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Valve has mutated from a game developer into a financial middleman

327 points by howard941 7y ago

tomcam 7y ago
> One factor is that a capitalist business mindset is badly corrosive to an artistic temperament. Not sure I agree. In fairly recent memory I can think of a number of artistic successes that were huge risks. It’s easy to forget that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie scared the shit out of Sony, and with good reason. It had a blockbuster budget and starred a contentious, commercially unproven actor doing an incredibly risky performance. To this day I suspect that Johnny Depp fully expected the movie to tank, and would have been quite happy if that had happened. Marvel’s investment in “Iron Man” wasn’t too far off that mark either. Its star had only recently been in the throes of drug problems so severe that at once point he wandered into a neighbor’s house and feel asleep naked in their bed. IIRD correctly the director’s biggest movie up to that time was “Swingers”. To me there were a couple of watershed moments in hip-hop that could have destroyed the careers of the people who finally said “yes”. Rap before “Straight out of Compton” was pretty much just supercharged melodic R&B with talking. Whoever signed Eminem was taking a serious risk as being guilty of the next Vanilla Ice. The XBox wasn’t greeted with any sense of inevitability. Microsoft had to deal with game developers in ways it had never worked with companies before. Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried). It was not at all clear that an accomplished systems/app company had any expertise at all in the Byzantine politics, personalities, and economics of the game world.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all. Dr. Dre, one of the most successful rap producers of all time, signed Eminem after watching him perform. By then, Eminem was already well-known in local circles for his rap skills, and there was no risk of him being seen as Vanilla Ice (a joke, incidentally, which worked its way into 8 Mile, which was loosely based on the life of Marshall Mathers).
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    >Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all. It certainly was, the first PotC movie basically established pirate movies as a blockbuster genre. And while the Mouse was already rich back in 2003, even for them $143M budget is a risk. Even movies that made them a small but solid profit like Tron Legacy (400M box office vs 170M budget) get chucked into the bin (most unfortunately, as I really liked the movie and had hoped for a sequel).
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Tron Legacy was a gamble, as it (a) did not have an all-star cast, (b) a director with a string of successful movies, or (c) a popular IP (the first Tron was a box office failure, which is why it took several decades to make a sequel). Legacy did well on an absolute basis...but Disney barely made back its total budget. $170m was just the production budget; marketing was roughly another $150-$170m. While the movie did well-ish overseas, much of that revenue was split with theaters or local distribution partners, so from Disney's point of view, they barely broke even. (Dmoestically, studios only get the lion's share of ticket price for the first 2-3 weeks of ticket sales which is why they heavily front-load their advertising.) PotC was most definitely not a gamble for Disney. PotC was always expected to be successful--it just turned out to be even more successful than they thought it would be. Note: the same thing that happened to Legacy happened to the Solo movie. Solo more than made back its production budget but did not make back its total budget including marketing, which is why at first glance it looks silly than Disney killed the Star Wars Story franchise. Both Legacy and Solo actually ended up being decently profitable for Disney when partner tie-ins, DVD sales, and streaming rights are included, but those income streams aren't known until long after the movie is deemed a success or failure and for most box office "failures" these long-tail income streams don't usually bring the movie into the black. TLDR: A movie has to make back more than its production and marketing budgets to be profitable to the studio, and since they split ticket sales with theaters and distribution partners, the movie has to do a lot better at the box office than just matching its budget.
- Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
  The xbox itself was pretty uninspiring. It was an underpowered budget PC, but someone said, "hey, let's take this gamespy app that people use for matchmaking and put it on a game console..." and suddenly it was christmas morning when you unwrapped Mario64 all over again. The xbox WAS xbox live matchmaking. It made online multiplayer on the console mainstream.
- Kuraj 7y ago
  > Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried) Man. Have you had a Zune? I loved mine! If I'm not mistaken, that was one of the first products where the Metro design language was applied. (edit: Media Center was the first)
deleted 7y ago
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riotnrrd 7y ago
I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there. I think the biggest problem they have -- which the author of this article touched on -- is that "success is the worst teacher." Valve have discovered that cosmetic microtransactions are big money makers, and thus every team at Valve was dedicated to that vision. When I was there (before Artifact started in open development) there were essentially no new games being developed at all. There was a small group that were working on Left for Dead 3 (cancelled shortly after I joined), and a couple guys poking around with pre-production experiments for Half-Life 3 (it will never be released). But effectively all the attention was focused on cosmetic items and "the economy" of the three big games (DOTA, CS:GO, and TF2). One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren't worth the effort. "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!) I joined Valve because I excited to work with what I thought was the best game studio in the world, but I left very depressed when I found out they're merely collecting rent from Steam and making in-game decorations for old games.
- onezerozeroone 7y ago
  While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
  - riotnrrd 7y ago
    In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes. The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing. I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
6cd6beb 7y ago
We could have a small handful of new great games from valve and an unknown number of crappy ones, or we could have steam. Steam provides more value to me on an order of magnitude that makes the article laughable. Steam is like netflix before licensing fractured their content between 20 different streaming services. It's not perfect but I'm not crying over the loss of a few more valve games. Better to burn out than fade away anyway.
- scrozart 7y ago
  +1. Steam is pretty damned good, and as a business they are killing it. As an entrepreneur I applaud them for the pivot. This isn't just hats - they provide access to TONS of games we would otherwise never see.
- yocheckit 7y ago
  Yea, I'm amazed at the criticisms of Steam. Do you all not remember buying computer games before it? Having friends on all different programs, no integrated chat, cds everywhere, this is defintely rose-tinted googles.
  - scbrg 7y ago
    I suppose I'm in a minority, but for me, all I want is the games. And those existed, in non physical form, before (or at least alongside) Steam. There were several stores that would simply let you buy the ability to download an installer, install a game and play it. No "portal", no "platform", no - thank the Gods! - integrated chat or friends lists. I could chat with people (who were not even on Steam!) very well on ICQ or whatever, thank you very much. I don't want anybody to know what I'm currently playing, or how many hours I've played it. I'm trying to imagine apt-get with an embedded, proprietary chat client and full name registration system - popcon mandatory. I wonder how many would see it as an improvement.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Hmm, I don't understand why it's either or. I don't see it as Steam vs quality Valve games, but rather CS:GO/Dota2/TF2 vs new Valve games. I don't think Steam itself has any impact of the games Valve release. If anything, it seems like the teams are fairly separate.
stupendousyappi 7y ago
One day, someone is going to write a fantastic magazine article about what happened to Valve.
- xtracerx 7y ago
  You should check this thread out. https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
  - VintageCool 7y ago
    That all sounds terrible, but to some extent I wonder if those problems are driven by the "self-organizing company" aspect or if they are the result of it being in the gaming industry. I think that every company in the gaming industry has the problem of not needing to treat their developers very well. There are so many CS students in college dreaming of building computer games that there are always a dozen people outside the door trying to get in. That gives the company a lot of leverage over its employees.
Cypher 7y ago
EA, Square, Activision, Ubisoft have killed atleast 100 good studios
deleted 7y ago
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stcredzero 7y ago
An og prospector looked around, and realized that the future was opening a store to sell backpacks and pickaxes to all the young newcomers who were coming in droves to stake their claim. Og prospector can't prospect like he used to. He's lost his chops. No matter. He's in the prospecting supply business now.
partiallypro 7y ago
I'll honestly be shocked if Microsoft doesn't buy Valve in day for Steam. Obviously current ownership would be against it, even with Nadella, but one day it just feels like a guarantee.
- anxman 7y ago
  Valve and Gabe have explicitly said if will never happen. I met someone that once worked at MSFT in corporate development. Said they spent months working on a pitch to acquire Valve and Gabe kicked them out of the building after 15 minutes.
  - ClassyJacket 7y ago
    Valve was founded by ex Microsoft devs wasn't it?
    - anxman 7y ago
      Yes. Gabe was the PM for Windows 95. He and Michael Harrington founded Valve a year afterwards. I asked Gabe over email if it was because it was the 1 year anniversary of Windows 95 launch but he said Valve was actually founded on his wedding day.
- Impossible 7y ago
  Microsoft has tried to buy Valve multiple times. The funny thing is, Valve originally pitched Steam to Microsoft, asked them to build it and they said no (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-indep...), so they ended up building it themselves. Now, there is no guarantee that a Microsoft built store would have gained the same dominance as Steam (MS has launched multiple stores for Windows since), but it's funny to think about.
- kbumsik 7y ago
  Any companies including Microsoft cannot buy Valve because it is a perfectly private company owned by Gabe.
intellix 7y ago
I think one of if not the best is Naughty Dog. They're consistently outputting masterpieces.
- sjwright 7y ago
  The Last of Us was a masterpiece. It deserves a place in gaming history up there with Doom and Half Life 2. The Uncharted series was gobsmacking production values, a great story, some nice adventure aspects, a bunch of lame puzzles, and at the core a mediocre hand-holdey shooter based on arcade style bullet-sponge mechanics made absurd by the parallel universe of endless cut-scenes where death is consequential and killing is bad. Why are we (the supposed good guys) gleefully murdering so many people? It doesn't make sense. I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me. And it became all the more obvious in the later games as the production values improved to ever-greater feats of realism and the cut-scenes increasingly humanised the enemy.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me. So I never played the Uncharted games (though I really loved The Last of Us) so this may be incorrect, but I thought the later Uncharted games made that contradiction a plot point?
  - sandov 7y ago
    Uncharted is a "don't think, enjoy" kind of game, and a pretty good one at that.
    - ionised 7y ago
      I wouldn't call it a masterpiece in that case.
  - olavgg 7y ago
    I got a PS4 for last christmas with The Last of Us. What a game, really good story telling. The game is over 5 years old and even today with a lot of great games, this is one of my all time favorites ever.
adnzzzzZ 7y ago
From the perspective of allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing. This talk goes over some of it https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape but essentially there are 1000+ games right now on Steam with over 100 concurrent users. One of my games got about 80 concurrent users at its peak and it made a small but fair amount of money (especially for someone's first game), so it's easy to see how 1000+ games with that many players means a lot of financial success to a lot of people, way more than ever happened before for game developers. One of the things that amazes me about Valve and the way they run Steam is that I released my game, had thousands of people buy it, pushed updates, communicated with users, got paid, and I had to speak with 0 human beings at Valve. It all just happened in a very predictable, clear and highly automated way. This lack of friction is absolutely amazing for developers, especially people like me who live in a third world country and would otherwise have more difficulty going through these processes for any number of reasons. So IMO they're doing something extremely valuable which is properly acting as a platform so that other game developers can succeed and make more and better games for everyone.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  Care to share more about your experience releasing a game? Did you do any marketing? How much did it make?
  - adnzzzzZ 7y ago
    https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/44 https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/44, https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/35 https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/35
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      Thanks for sharing. That is a pretty good amount for a first game and what looks like a niche title. Are you making indie games for a living?
    - PatrolX 7y ago
nraynaud 7y ago
every sufficiently big company will eventually want to move into payment/banking. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Car manufacturers, supermarkets, airplane manufacturers, etc. It's the dream of every MBA to skim on top of transactions instead of directly producing value.
dejaime 7y ago
Valve created the digital game stores as we know today, away from the expensive physical copies into the digital distribution. Before that, to release a game, one would need a publisher, a distribution deal, a ton of money wasted to get the game into the player's hard drives. What Valve did is much much more significant for the gaming industry and sparked a ton of indie developers. That's much more impactful than half life 3 could have ever been.
Dowwie 7y ago
By focusing on the Steam platform rather than on its own creative game productions, Valve has shared more creativity with the world than it could ever had accomplished on its own. It is a creativity multiplier. It's a tremendous success in business and the arts.
walbold 7y ago
I’m surprised that Valve stayed so heavily entrenched in just microtransactions. I wonder how much money they could have made if they also focused on licensing out a newer source engine, and funneling source engine games into their platform.
shmerl 7y ago
Whatever they evolved to, their contribution to Linux gaming is outstanding, so thanks Valve for doing it. Without Valve, we wouldn't have such rapid progress of Wine/dxvk, radv, OpenXR and other gaming related open stack.
baron816 7y ago
>How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios Ahem, no. Capitalism didn't kill it. Had Valve tried to maximize revenue/income, it would either hire more people to develop those profitable franchises, or contracted the development out to another studio. At the very least, they could have sold off the rights to Microsoft or Sony and allow them to butcher sequels and movies. Had capitalism won, we'd be seeing Half-Life 12, Portal 7, TF 10, CS 8, LFD 6, etc. There's a lot of creative property there that could have been developed to death. That they didn't do that says they'd give up on revenue (at least in the mid term) to protect those properties.
- anoncareer0212 7y ago
  Capitalism lost, the structural profits of a platform make a rational actor choose not to incur the costs of licensing core IP
User23 7y ago
Valve is not perfect, but making them out to be rent seekers is a lie. They revolutionized the PC games market to the benefit of developers and consumers, and they are actively improving their platform and driving adoption of new technologies like VR. Also this “reporter” evidently knows nothing about how Valve actually does things internally.
- robdachshund 7y ago
  Valve doesn't do anything internally because their nonsensical corporate structure makes all projects dead on arrival and creates powerful cliques of employees.
jibanes 7y ago
Paid content, Valve is an awesome company.
Mugwort 7y ago
Capitalism killed Portal 3 and Half-Life 3.
- doomjunky 7y ago
  Capitalism made Half-Life and Portal.
rocky1138 7y ago
I can see a future where the games portion of Valve is spun off as a separate company or even possibly licensed to a trusted game development house.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Unlike what the article implies, I don't think Steam is the reason hasn't put any new great single-player games, but rather their big 3 micro-transaction games (TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2). From what I understand, the Steam team isn't even that big, most of Valve employees work on games, but again, it's mostly those 3 that bring all the money. Therefore, splitting out the game company won't solve the real issue, which is that they are more focused on addictive games people play for thousands of hours, over quality award winning story telling.
jjdredd 7y ago
> June 4, 2019 They're 10 years late with this article.
taurath 7y ago
I think they misspelled casino operator.
sandov 7y ago
I can't feel upset about Valve's success. I think their existence has done a net good to the industry, the games are cheap, the system works well and they support Linux better than any other big name in the creative industry, they even employed thr DXVK developer. We could dream with Netflix supporting Linux the way Valve does.
bartimus 7y ago
It's ridiculous how this article is displaying Valve's strength as a failure. Valve is exactly the poster boy of a successful agile organic company that is run by software engineers. A company able to reinvent itself to meet demands. They have been pioneering the concepts of the app store and micro-purchases making it the most profitable company per employee. Things that Apple and Google get applauded for. What's amazing is that those profits didn't come from the demands of profit seeking shareholders. It came from the demands of the people, the software engineers, themselves who work at the company. So they stopped producing games. So what? Valve is probably in the most optimal position to quickly reinvent itself yet again if new demands and opportunities arise. This article is an attack on software engineers. Where non-engineers try to swoop in and take their power positions because they "know" better what a company should be doing. This is where engineers get pushed down in the power chain. It's exactly how great products get killed.
- sametmax 7y ago
  I'll also add, as a regular dota player, that they don't just "get rent" out of it. First, the game is free to play and very deep as-is. There is no missing feature or add-on to pay for in order to have the full game experience, and the experience is amazing. Second, they update it every month and managed to keep it interesting through the years. It's an incredible feat. In the end, it's one of the few places where I'm more than happy to pay micro transactions for virtual hats and idiotic gimmics. Because they do a hell of a job. Of course I would love a portal 3. But I'm not disapointed of what they are doing right now. They still rock.
  - Kelteseth 7y ago
    I can second this. The Dota team at Valve managed to continuously deliver great content in form of updates and tournaments.
  - wocram 7y ago
    I mostly agree with you, but DotA plus is a shift towards subtly pay-to-win features. It's always surprising when a subscription lapses and I find out something is a DotA plus feature and not just part of the game.
stevage 7y ago
I really don't see the problem here. It's not like there's a shortage of games, or game developers in the world. If one of them has gotten out of that market, to develop a shared platform that everyone (developers and consumers alike) want and need, isn't everyone better off?
GershwinA 7y ago
Personally I like steam, and I don't mind them being a current monopolists of gaming platforms. All of the gaming market has been capitalized and we see companies like EA pushing their teams to the limit just for a release before a fiscal year. Results in half-baked product. Big publishers, including Blizzard, are having a tough time, and steam is a great platform for smaller devs to promote their content (Darkest Dungeon is a good success story). Sure Valves economic policies are profit oriented, but IMHO there's a good side to steam.
thefounder 7y ago
Let's hope Blizzard won't follow the same path. I have hope for one game there...
lenova 7y ago
One day I would love to see an article or podcast on how Yaris Varoufakis changed Valve's direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...
- li4ick 7y ago
  Oh my god! I've seen so many videos with Yanis, and I also knew that Valve had a Greek economist in their midst, but I never linked the two. A lot of things make sense now.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  He managed a total of 4 of those weekly blog posts, it looks like they drifted apart fairly quickly.
Strom 7y ago
This feels like another sour grapes article by someone that wants Valve to focus on their favorite games instead. Dota 2 is Steam's most played game [1] and has been so for most of the last decade. I have spent thousands of hours playing it during that time and I know dozens of people personally who have played it even more. We are happy that Valve is providing unprecedented support for the game. The kind of support which is rare. Just look at new games like EA's Anthem, where players are complaining about barely receiving any updates, although they were promised a bunch. Dota 2's success doesn't come from a release dump in 2013 and then just an influx of hats. There's continuous development that's happening on the game. There are new features added all the time, game mechanic changes, new heroes, new items, map changes etc. The whole engine was swapped out from Source to Source 2. There was a year where there were two branches of Dota 2 being played concurrently as this transition happened. Very few games in history have received this kind of attention. On top of that Dota 2 has one of the best executed e-sports scenes. Valve has been directing the scene structurally, supporting it with unrivaled prize pools [2], and building a lot of features into the game to support e-sports, e.g. in-client spectating with both observer camera and player perspective. So no, Valve has not mutated into a financial middleman. They're hard at work at supporting one of the most successful games in history. The kind of success that other game developers can only dream of. Sure that means they can't also be working on a bunch of other games, but that doesn't make them any less of a game developer. -- [1] https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ [2] $179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far. https://www.esportsearnings.com/games https://www.esportsearnings.com/games
- noxvilleza 7y ago
  '$179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far' Come now, this part of your response is totally misleading. Valve contribute a base $1.6M for TIs, $3M for the old majors, $150k for the current minors and $500k for the current majors. The vast majority of the $179M is crowd-funded money: money which Valve facilitated the collection of but which many people only gave to boost the prize pool of The Internationals.
  - Strom 7y ago
runn1ng 7y ago
I find it funny how this article casts Steam as something easy to do, as if its success has been random and just first mover advantage. Making Steam and making it work is hard. Steam does not have the advantage of a platform monopoly like Apple or Sony stores. They earned their place in the market. And as other said here, Steam is more important for gaming history than Half Life 3 would be.
- gnode 7y ago
  I think to a large extent it is first mover advantage, but that's not something to be taken lightly. They invested in developing an internet distribution platform at a time when broadband penetration was relatively low. I couldn't get anything other than dial-up internet access, and Steam seemed more of an inconvenience than a revolutionary idea.
EugeneOZ 7y ago
They should not forget that their money-making games are getting older every year - better to start creating some new "money-maker".
timavr 7y ago
Making hit/innovative games is super hard. Not only from a financial perspective but from an emotional/personal as well. You need people who can dedicate years of their life developing new tech and actually making the thing, knowing that there is a large chance to fail. As per Valve handbook, each "co-worker" should think about the risks to the company and it is not surprising that as a group they work on less risky things which can generate profit. (Steam, existing titles). But as competition in storefronts increases, I think they will be forced to innovate, either through VR, their own games or some other way.
otikik 7y ago
I understand all this and yet even a hit of a rumour of Valve working on Half Life 3 makes my heart pump and brings butterflies to my stomach. On the other hand, "so and so company made millions selling hats on a videogame" means nothing to me. I understand that making money is a very powerful drive for a lot of people. But what's another million when you have 100 million? Valve can afford to implement Half Life 3 (or pay someone to do it for them). It would, at the very least, make a profit, even if it wasn't a huge success. Instead they are letting the IP die a slow death. That would make me sad. The 101 million would help, for a while, but the pain would return.
- raphaelj 7y ago
  Something the author didn't address in the article is opportunity cost. It might be that the employee supply at Valve is limited, and that as a for profit company, it has to allocate this limited resource the most profitable way. Making 50 employees work on HL3 might get you $100M in profit, but why would you do that if you can make $150M more on hats with the very same team?
rufusroflpunch 7y ago
This is a really disappointing article. Valve has changed the PC gaming industry in multiple ways, actually keeping the market alive and rejuvenating it. First, they broke the traditional publishing model with Steam, offering an entirely new way for developers (especially independent developers) to deliver their games to consumers without needing a publisher. Second, their current project is clearly geared toward breaking the Windows monopoly on PC gaming and they have done a tremendous job so far. Thanks to Steam and Valve's efforts, more games are available than ever on Mac and Linux. What is the author's take on Valve's interesting and revolutionary innovations on the business side of PC gaming? "Capitalism bad." It is an ideological piece with nothing interesting to say.

327 points by howard941 7y ago

> One factor is that a capitalist business mindset is badly corrosive to an artistic temperament. Not sure I agree. In fairly recent memory I can think of a number of artistic successes that were huge risks. It’s easy to forget that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie scared the shit out of Sony, and with good reason. It had a blockbuster budget and starred a contentious, commercially unproven actor doing an incredibly risky performance. To this day I suspect that Johnny Depp fully expected the movie to tank, and would have been quite happy if that had happened. Marvel’s investment in “Iron Man” wasn’t too far off that mark either. Its star had only recently been in the throes of drug problems so severe that at once point he wandered into a neighbor’s house and feel asleep naked in their bed. IIRD correctly the director’s biggest movie up to that time was “Swingers”. To me there were a couple of watershed moments in hip-hop that could have destroyed the careers of the people who finally said “yes”. Rap before “Straight out of Compton” was pretty much just supercharged melodic R&B with talking. Whoever signed Eminem was taking a serious risk as being guilty of the next Vanilla Ice. The XBox wasn’t greeted with any sense of inevitability. Microsoft had to deal with game developers in ways it had never worked with companies before. Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried). It was not at all clear that an accomplished systems/app company had any expertise at all in the Byzantine politics, personalities, and economics of the game world.

gamblor956 7y ago
Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all. Dr. Dre, one of the most successful rap producers of all time, signed Eminem after watching him perform. By then, Eminem was already well-known in local circles for his rap skills, and there was no risk of him being seen as Vanilla Ice (a joke, incidentally, which worked its way into 8 Mile, which was loosely based on the life of Marshall Mathers).
- mschuster91 7y ago
  >Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all. It certainly was, the first PotC movie basically established pirate movies as a blockbuster genre. And while the Mouse was already rich back in 2003, even for them $143M budget is a risk. Even movies that made them a small but solid profit like Tron Legacy (400M box office vs 170M budget) get chucked into the bin (most unfortunately, as I really liked the movie and had hoped for a sequel).
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Tron Legacy was a gamble, as it (a) did not have an all-star cast, (b) a director with a string of successful movies, or (c) a popular IP (the first Tron was a box office failure, which is why it took several decades to make a sequel). Legacy did well on an absolute basis...but Disney barely made back its total budget. $170m was just the production budget; marketing was roughly another $150-$170m. While the movie did well-ish overseas, much of that revenue was split with theaters or local distribution partners, so from Disney's point of view, they barely broke even. (Dmoestically, studios only get the lion's share of ticket price for the first 2-3 weeks of ticket sales which is why they heavily front-load their advertising.) PotC was most definitely not a gamble for Disney. PotC was always expected to be successful--it just turned out to be even more successful than they thought it would be. Note: the same thing that happened to Legacy happened to the Solo movie. Solo more than made back its production budget but did not make back its total budget including marketing, which is why at first glance it looks silly than Disney killed the Star Wars Story franchise. Both Legacy and Solo actually ended up being decently profitable for Disney when partner tie-ins, DVD sales, and streaming rights are included, but those income streams aren't known until long after the movie is deemed a success or failure and for most box office "failures" these long-tail income streams don't usually bring the movie into the black. TLDR: A movie has to make back more than its production and marketing budgets to be profitable to the studio, and since they split ticket sales with theaters and distribution partners, the movie has to do a lot better at the box office than just matching its budget.
Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
The xbox itself was pretty uninspiring. It was an underpowered budget PC, but someone said, "hey, let's take this gamespy app that people use for matchmaking and put it on a game console..." and suddenly it was christmas morning when you unwrapped Mario64 all over again. The xbox WAS xbox live matchmaking. It made online multiplayer on the console mainstream.
Kuraj 7y ago
> Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried) Man. Have you had a Zune? I loved mine! If I'm not mistaken, that was one of the first products where the Metro design language was applied. (edit: Media Center was the first)

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riotnrrd 7y ago

I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there. I think the biggest problem they have -- which the author of this article touched on -- is that "success is the worst teacher." Valve have discovered that cosmetic microtransactions are big money makers, and thus every team at Valve was dedicated to that vision. When I was there (before Artifact started in open development) there were essentially no new games being developed at all. There was a small group that were working on Left for Dead 3 (cancelled shortly after I joined), and a couple guys poking around with pre-production experiments for Half-Life 3 (it will never be released). But effectively all the attention was focused on cosmetic items and "the economy" of the three big games (DOTA, CS:GO, and TF2). One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren't worth the effort. "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!) I joined Valve because I excited to work with what I thought was the best game studio in the world, but I left very depressed when I found out they're merely collecting rent from Steam and making in-game decorations for old games.

onezerozeroone 7y ago
While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
- riotnrrd 7y ago
  In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes. The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing. I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.

6cd6beb 7y ago

We could have a small handful of new great games from valve and an unknown number of crappy ones, or we could have steam. Steam provides more value to me on an order of magnitude that makes the article laughable. Steam is like netflix before licensing fractured their content between 20 different streaming services. It's not perfect but I'm not crying over the loss of a few more valve games. Better to burn out than fade away anyway.

scrozart 7y ago
+1. Steam is pretty damned good, and as a business they are killing it. As an entrepreneur I applaud them for the pivot. This isn't just hats - they provide access to TONS of games we would otherwise never see.
yocheckit 7y ago
Yea, I'm amazed at the criticisms of Steam. Do you all not remember buying computer games before it? Having friends on all different programs, no integrated chat, cds everywhere, this is defintely rose-tinted googles.
- scbrg 7y ago
  I suppose I'm in a minority, but for me, all I want is the games. And those existed, in non physical form, before (or at least alongside) Steam. There were several stores that would simply let you buy the ability to download an installer, install a game and play it. No "portal", no "platform", no - thank the Gods! - integrated chat or friends lists. I could chat with people (who were not even on Steam!) very well on ICQ or whatever, thank you very much. I don't want anybody to know what I'm currently playing, or how many hours I've played it. I'm trying to imagine apt-get with an embedded, proprietary chat client and full name registration system - popcon mandatory. I wonder how many would see it as an improvement.
ehsankia 7y ago
Hmm, I don't understand why it's either or. I don't see it as Steam vs quality Valve games, but rather CS:GO/Dota2/TF2 vs new Valve games. I don't think Steam itself has any impact of the games Valve release. If anything, it seems like the teams are fairly separate.

stupendousyappi 7y ago

One day, someone is going to write a fantastic magazine article about what happened to Valve.

xtracerx 7y ago
You should check this thread out. https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
- VintageCool 7y ago
  That all sounds terrible, but to some extent I wonder if those problems are driven by the "self-organizing company" aspect or if they are the result of it being in the gaming industry. I think that every company in the gaming industry has the problem of not needing to treat their developers very well. There are so many CS students in college dreaming of building computer games that there are always a dozen people outside the door trying to get in. That gives the company a lot of leverage over its employees.

Cypher 7y ago

EA, Square, Activision, Ubisoft have killed atleast 100 good studios

deleted 7y ago

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stcredzero 7y ago

An og prospector looked around, and realized that the future was opening a store to sell backpacks and pickaxes to all the young newcomers who were coming in droves to stake their claim. Og prospector can't prospect like he used to. He's lost his chops. No matter. He's in the prospecting supply business now.

partiallypro 7y ago

I'll honestly be shocked if Microsoft doesn't buy Valve in day for Steam. Obviously current ownership would be against it, even with Nadella, but one day it just feels like a guarantee.

anxman 7y ago
Valve and Gabe have explicitly said if will never happen. I met someone that once worked at MSFT in corporate development. Said they spent months working on a pitch to acquire Valve and Gabe kicked them out of the building after 15 minutes.
- ClassyJacket 7y ago
  Valve was founded by ex Microsoft devs wasn't it?
  - anxman 7y ago
    Yes. Gabe was the PM for Windows 95. He and Michael Harrington founded Valve a year afterwards. I asked Gabe over email if it was because it was the 1 year anniversary of Windows 95 launch but he said Valve was actually founded on his wedding day.
Impossible 7y ago
Microsoft has tried to buy Valve multiple times. The funny thing is, Valve originally pitched Steam to Microsoft, asked them to build it and they said no (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-indep...), so they ended up building it themselves. Now, there is no guarantee that a Microsoft built store would have gained the same dominance as Steam (MS has launched multiple stores for Windows since), but it's funny to think about.
kbumsik 7y ago
Any companies including Microsoft cannot buy Valve because it is a perfectly private company owned by Gabe.

intellix 7y ago

I think one of if not the best is Naughty Dog. They're consistently outputting masterpieces.

sjwright 7y ago
The Last of Us was a masterpiece. It deserves a place in gaming history up there with Doom and Half Life 2. The Uncharted series was gobsmacking production values, a great story, some nice adventure aspects, a bunch of lame puzzles, and at the core a mediocre hand-holdey shooter based on arcade style bullet-sponge mechanics made absurd by the parallel universe of endless cut-scenes where death is consequential and killing is bad. Why are we (the supposed good guys) gleefully murdering so many people? It doesn't make sense. I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me. And it became all the more obvious in the later games as the production values improved to ever-greater feats of realism and the cut-scenes increasingly humanised the enemy.
- eropple 7y ago
  > I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me. So I never played the Uncharted games (though I really loved The Last of Us) so this may be incorrect, but I thought the later Uncharted games made that contradiction a plot point?
- sandov 7y ago
  Uncharted is a "don't think, enjoy" kind of game, and a pretty good one at that.
  - ionised 7y ago
    I wouldn't call it a masterpiece in that case.
- olavgg 7y ago
  I got a PS4 for last christmas with The Last of Us. What a game, really good story telling. The game is over 5 years old and even today with a lot of great games, this is one of my all time favorites ever.

adnzzzzZ 7y ago

From the perspective of allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing. This talk goes over some of it https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape but essentially there are 1000+ games right now on Steam with over 100 concurrent users. One of my games got about 80 concurrent users at its peak and it made a small but fair amount of money (especially for someone's first game), so it's easy to see how 1000+ games with that many players means a lot of financial success to a lot of people, way more than ever happened before for game developers. One of the things that amazes me about Valve and the way they run Steam is that I released my game, had thousands of people buy it, pushed updates, communicated with users, got paid, and I had to speak with 0 human beings at Valve. It all just happened in a very predictable, clear and highly automated way. This lack of friction is absolutely amazing for developers, especially people like me who live in a third world country and would otherwise have more difficulty going through these processes for any number of reasons. So IMO they're doing something extremely valuable which is properly acting as a platform so that other game developers can succeed and make more and better games for everyone.

b_tterc_p 7y ago
Care to share more about your experience releasing a game? Did you do any marketing? How much did it make?
- adnzzzzZ 7y ago
  https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/44 https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/44, https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/35 https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/35
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing. That is a pretty good amount for a first game and what looks like a niche title. Are you making indie games for a living?
  - PatrolX 7y ago

nraynaud 7y ago

every sufficiently big company will eventually want to move into payment/banking. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Car manufacturers, supermarkets, airplane manufacturers, etc. It's the dream of every MBA to skim on top of transactions instead of directly producing value.

dejaime 7y ago

Valve created the digital game stores as we know today, away from the expensive physical copies into the digital distribution. Before that, to release a game, one would need a publisher, a distribution deal, a ton of money wasted to get the game into the player's hard drives. What Valve did is much much more significant for the gaming industry and sparked a ton of indie developers. That's much more impactful than half life 3 could have ever been.

Dowwie 7y ago

By focusing on the Steam platform rather than on its own creative game productions, Valve has shared more creativity with the world than it could ever had accomplished on its own. It is a creativity multiplier. It's a tremendous success in business and the arts.

walbold 7y ago

I’m surprised that Valve stayed so heavily entrenched in just microtransactions. I wonder how much money they could have made if they also focused on licensing out a newer source engine, and funneling source engine games into their platform.

shmerl 7y ago

Whatever they evolved to, their contribution to Linux gaming is outstanding, so thanks Valve for doing it. Without Valve, we wouldn't have such rapid progress of Wine/dxvk, radv, OpenXR and other gaming related open stack.

baron816 7y ago

>How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios Ahem, no. Capitalism didn't kill it. Had Valve tried to maximize revenue/income, it would either hire more people to develop those profitable franchises, or contracted the development out to another studio. At the very least, they could have sold off the rights to Microsoft or Sony and allow them to butcher sequels and movies. Had capitalism won, we'd be seeing Half-Life 12, Portal 7, TF 10, CS 8, LFD 6, etc. There's a lot of creative property there that could have been developed to death. That they didn't do that says they'd give up on revenue (at least in the mid term) to protect those properties.

anoncareer0212 7y ago
Capitalism lost, the structural profits of a platform make a rational actor choose not to incur the costs of licensing core IP

User23 7y ago

Valve is not perfect, but making them out to be rent seekers is a lie. They revolutionized the PC games market to the benefit of developers and consumers, and they are actively improving their platform and driving adoption of new technologies like VR. Also this “reporter” evidently knows nothing about how Valve actually does things internally.

robdachshund 7y ago
Valve doesn't do anything internally because their nonsensical corporate structure makes all projects dead on arrival and creates powerful cliques of employees.

jibanes 7y ago

Paid content, Valve is an awesome company.

Mugwort 7y ago

Capitalism killed Portal 3 and Half-Life 3.

doomjunky 7y ago
Capitalism made Half-Life and Portal.

rocky1138 7y ago

I can see a future where the games portion of Valve is spun off as a separate company or even possibly licensed to a trusted game development house.

ehsankia 7y ago
Unlike what the article implies, I don't think Steam is the reason hasn't put any new great single-player games, but rather their big 3 micro-transaction games (TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2). From what I understand, the Steam team isn't even that big, most of Valve employees work on games, but again, it's mostly those 3 that bring all the money. Therefore, splitting out the game company won't solve the real issue, which is that they are more focused on addictive games people play for thousands of hours, over quality award winning story telling.

jjdredd 7y ago

> June 4, 2019 They're 10 years late with this article.

taurath 7y ago

I think they misspelled casino operator.

sandov 7y ago

I can't feel upset about Valve's success. I think their existence has done a net good to the industry, the games are cheap, the system works well and they support Linux better than any other big name in the creative industry, they even employed thr DXVK developer. We could dream with Netflix supporting Linux the way Valve does.

bartimus 7y ago

It's ridiculous how this article is displaying Valve's strength as a failure. Valve is exactly the poster boy of a successful agile organic company that is run by software engineers. A company able to reinvent itself to meet demands. They have been pioneering the concepts of the app store and micro-purchases making it the most profitable company per employee. Things that Apple and Google get applauded for. What's amazing is that those profits didn't come from the demands of profit seeking shareholders. It came from the demands of the people, the software engineers, themselves who work at the company. So they stopped producing games. So what? Valve is probably in the most optimal position to quickly reinvent itself yet again if new demands and opportunities arise. This article is an attack on software engineers. Where non-engineers try to swoop in and take their power positions because they "know" better what a company should be doing. This is where engineers get pushed down in the power chain. It's exactly how great products get killed.

sametmax 7y ago
I'll also add, as a regular dota player, that they don't just "get rent" out of it. First, the game is free to play and very deep as-is. There is no missing feature or add-on to pay for in order to have the full game experience, and the experience is amazing. Second, they update it every month and managed to keep it interesting through the years. It's an incredible feat. In the end, it's one of the few places where I'm more than happy to pay micro transactions for virtual hats and idiotic gimmics. Because they do a hell of a job. Of course I would love a portal 3. But I'm not disapointed of what they are doing right now. They still rock.
- Kelteseth 7y ago
  I can second this. The Dota team at Valve managed to continuously deliver great content in form of updates and tournaments.
- wocram 7y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but DotA plus is a shift towards subtly pay-to-win features. It's always surprising when a subscription lapses and I find out something is a DotA plus feature and not just part of the game.

stevage 7y ago

I really don't see the problem here. It's not like there's a shortage of games, or game developers in the world. If one of them has gotten out of that market, to develop a shared platform that everyone (developers and consumers alike) want and need, isn't everyone better off?

GershwinA 7y ago

Personally I like steam, and I don't mind them being a current monopolists of gaming platforms. All of the gaming market has been capitalized and we see companies like EA pushing their teams to the limit just for a release before a fiscal year. Results in half-baked product. Big publishers, including Blizzard, are having a tough time, and steam is a great platform for smaller devs to promote their content (Darkest Dungeon is a good success story). Sure Valves economic policies are profit oriented, but IMHO there's a good side to steam.

thefounder 7y ago

Let's hope Blizzard won't follow the same path. I have hope for one game there...

lenova 7y ago

One day I would love to see an article or podcast on how Yaris Varoufakis changed Valve's direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...

li4ick 7y ago
Oh my god! I've seen so many videos with Yanis, and I also knew that Valve had a Greek economist in their midst, but I never linked the two. A lot of things make sense now.
mattmanser 7y ago
He managed a total of 4 of those weekly blog posts, it looks like they drifted apart fairly quickly.

Strom 7y ago

This feels like another sour grapes article by someone that wants Valve to focus on their favorite games instead. Dota 2 is Steam's most played game [1] and has been so for most of the last decade. I have spent thousands of hours playing it during that time and I know dozens of people personally who have played it even more. We are happy that Valve is providing unprecedented support for the game. The kind of support which is rare. Just look at new games like EA's Anthem, where players are complaining about barely receiving any updates, although they were promised a bunch. Dota 2's success doesn't come from a release dump in 2013 and then just an influx of hats. There's continuous development that's happening on the game. There are new features added all the time, game mechanic changes, new heroes, new items, map changes etc. The whole engine was swapped out from Source to Source 2. There was a year where there were two branches of Dota 2 being played concurrently as this transition happened. Very few games in history have received this kind of attention. On top of that Dota 2 has one of the best executed e-sports scenes. Valve has been directing the scene structurally, supporting it with unrivaled prize pools [2], and building a lot of features into the game to support e-sports, e.g. in-client spectating with both observer camera and player perspective. So no, Valve has not mutated into a financial middleman. They're hard at work at supporting one of the most successful games in history. The kind of success that other game developers can only dream of. Sure that means they can't also be working on a bunch of other games, but that doesn't make them any less of a game developer. -- [1] https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ [2] $179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far. https://www.esportsearnings.com/games https://www.esportsearnings.com/games

noxvilleza 7y ago
'$179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far' Come now, this part of your response is totally misleading. Valve contribute a base $1.6M for TIs, $3M for the old majors, $150k for the current minors and $500k for the current majors. The vast majority of the $179M is crowd-funded money: money which Valve facilitated the collection of but which many people only gave to boost the prize pool of The Internationals.
- Strom 7y ago

runn1ng 7y ago

I find it funny how this article casts Steam as something easy to do, as if its success has been random and just first mover advantage. Making Steam and making it work is hard. Steam does not have the advantage of a platform monopoly like Apple or Sony stores. They earned their place in the market. And as other said here, Steam is more important for gaming history than Half Life 3 would be.

gnode 7y ago
I think to a large extent it is first mover advantage, but that's not something to be taken lightly. They invested in developing an internet distribution platform at a time when broadband penetration was relatively low. I couldn't get anything other than dial-up internet access, and Steam seemed more of an inconvenience than a revolutionary idea.

EugeneOZ 7y ago

They should not forget that their money-making games are getting older every year - better to start creating some new "money-maker".

timavr 7y ago

Making hit/innovative games is super hard. Not only from a financial perspective but from an emotional/personal as well. You need people who can dedicate years of their life developing new tech and actually making the thing, knowing that there is a large chance to fail. As per Valve handbook, each "co-worker" should think about the risks to the company and it is not surprising that as a group they work on less risky things which can generate profit. (Steam, existing titles). But as competition in storefronts increases, I think they will be forced to innovate, either through VR, their own games or some other way.

otikik 7y ago

I understand all this and yet even a hit of a rumour of Valve working on Half Life 3 makes my heart pump and brings butterflies to my stomach. On the other hand, "so and so company made millions selling hats on a videogame" means nothing to me. I understand that making money is a very powerful drive for a lot of people. But what's another million when you have 100 million? Valve can afford to implement Half Life 3 (or pay someone to do it for them). It would, at the very least, make a profit, even if it wasn't a huge success. Instead they are letting the IP die a slow death. That would make me sad. The 101 million would help, for a while, but the pain would return.

raphaelj 7y ago
Something the author didn't address in the article is opportunity cost. It might be that the employee supply at Valve is limited, and that as a for profit company, it has to allocate this limited resource the most profitable way. Making 50 employees work on HL3 might get you $100M in profit, but why would you do that if you can make $150M more on hats with the very same team?

rufusroflpunch 7y ago

This is a really disappointing article. Valve has changed the PC gaming industry in multiple ways, actually keeping the market alive and rejuvenating it. First, they broke the traditional publishing model with Steam, offering an entirely new way for developers (especially independent developers) to deliver their games to consumers without needing a publisher. Second, their current project is clearly geared toward breaking the Windows monopoly on PC gaming and they have done a tremendous job so far. Thanks to Steam and Valve's efforts, more games are available than ever on Mac and Linux. What is the author's take on Valve's interesting and revolutionary innovations on the business side of PC gaming? "Capitalism bad." It is an ideological piece with nothing interesting to say.