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I'm just saying. If Gabe ever sells, we're seeing $100-$120 games being standard, DRM out the wazoo, and a complete lockdown on the user review system. Just to start.
Hence why I would like Steam to add a little button at checkout to let you donate to Gaben's immortality fund.
Except there are like five other companies champing at the bit to run what is basically a free money printer that Gabe has set up. Valve basically does nothing as a company and gets paid for it because of steam. The only reason it has no real competition is because they know they have to keep their customers happy. This isn't something "Valve is a particularly moral upstanding company" thing, it's a plain market incentives thing. If anything, it might be better if they had some real competition.
All of those are publicly traded and subject to different incentives/pressures.
Namely, the incentive to gobble up 100% of any consumer surplus that might exist in a product.
Gabe could maybe double his own net worth if he was willing to be less consumer-friendly. There's certainly ways he could exploit the access the Steam platform gives him to various valuable demographics.
At a bare minimum, they could serve targeted ads (for things other than Vidya) on the platform.
But he has no legal obligation to do so since 'shareholder value' is not his primary concern.
Just take a quick assessment of ANY other comparable industry and see if there's any exceptions to the general rule that publicly-traded companies enshittify their product once they've achieved market dominance.
This seems like a pretty personal feeling that you have and I'm going to require significant evidence (not just feelings, actual economic data of some sort) to accept the claim.
Just a few points here--first of all, market dominance isn't very common. Second, it usually ceases to exist once a company starts making bad products. That's kind of how markets work after all. Exceptions are usually products which aren't very susceptible to market forces like cable/internet companies that own infrastructure with high barriers to entry or government regulation keeping out competitors, which indeed often suck. Valve's business model is basically the opposite of high barrier to entry. It costs almost nothing to run and you just need the money to spin up some servers. Market dominance is completely held together by keeping their customers happy.
Beyond that, the idea that Valve is just magically more kind because its leader is some nerd saint strikes me as unbelievable. Of course different leaders create different results, but guess what, Gabe wants money too.
Lets discuss what sort of 'economic data' would capture the phenomena we're talking about. What is an economic term for 'enshittification' or whatever phenomena, and what metrics capture it? Consumer sentiment?
Of course, my point that "public companies will happily capture consumer surplus to maximize profits" is fairly standard economic logic, since private companies can have much larger time horizons and consider costumer retention through brand reputation and 'fair' pricing a more important factor. Similar incentive issues as public companies exist with Private Equity.
Thing is, I can probably point out a solid few dozen companies that are notorious for producing high-quality products or services in a particular niche, at reasonable prices, and are beloved specifically because they don't treat customers like cattle to be milked dry at every transaction.
One that I often come back to:
The Arizona Iced Tea company.
Privately owned by the same dude/family for 30-something years, and they have resisted raising the price above 99 cents a can despite the beverage industry as a class exploding in size and revenue.
Read that story about the owner and it is clear that its his personal philosophy that's holding the competitive pressures at bay, less so than pure economic sense. And they obviously don't have 'market dominance' so casting monopoly accusations at them would be absurd. The owner is, like Gabe, focused on keeping the quality of the product high, responding to consumer demands, and avoiding abrupt price hikes.
Obviously this guy could sell out to PepsiCo TOMORROW if he wanted, but his willingness to just... not, is only possible because he has no shareholders to appease. And a multi-billion dollar net worth.
And every time one of those drinks sells for a Dollar to somebody who would have paid $2 for it, that's $1 of consumer surplus in the buyer's pocket.
Some other similar companies:
Chik-Fil-A. with their NOTORIOUSLY amazing service and high quality.
In-N-out Burger.
Yeungling Brewing. A favorite of mine.
Canva. (compare to fucking adobe.)
Wawa. (compare to 7/11)
Buc-ees.
Craigslist.
Harbor Freight.
And many such companies that are primarily regional presences.
Note I'm not claiming such companies rarely/never take anti-consumer actions, but more that they optimize for a higher quality/price ratio (they resist enshittification) than comparable public companies, and are able to resist the trends that public corporations follow to the customer's detriment.
And I'm claiming that any of the above-named companies, if they went public, would rapidly see the introduction of more consumer-unfriendly practices and rising prices/slashing of quality to quickly squeeze out more profitability.
Yes, but that these companies can just lower quality and raise prices without consequence is in fact not standard economic logic. "If it wasn't for Gabe they'd kill our firstborns etc. etc." does not follow logically from any of your points. If Steam makes a shitty product people will jump ship because there are tons of other options. That's the center of all of this that you don't seem to acknowledge. The companies you listed are popular because people like them. If Chik Fil-A sold a "consumer unfriendly chicken sandwich" (whatever the hell that might be) it probably wouldn't be a very popular store, would it?
There are differences in privately and publicly traded companies, yeah. However, it's just not this simple. Privately owned companies often times are maximally profit seeking and publicly traded companies often aren't.
Not if Steam is simply the least shitty of the options! My point is that Steam is far and away the best product, so if Gaben wanted to make some money by milking his customers some more he could probably extract quite a bit from them before the Epic Games store looked like a real improvement.
There's a qualitative difference between "consumers pinch their nose and choose your product because the alternatives are worse" and "consumers happily fork over money and consider your product the standard to which all others should aspire."
While I'm not quite saying "Steam is indifferent to competitive pressure due to their position," I am saying the Gabe can make decisions without worrying about the next quarter's earnings report. And he's consistently made decisions (including the decision to NOT change certain things) that make the users happier.
Can you explain why other existing players, which are also multi-billion dollar corporations, haven't just gone ahead and copied Valve's model for the Steam store as closely as possible? Why is there no Pepsi to Valve's Coca-Cola in this situation?
I think they have and them some. Weren't some platforms literally giving away titles for free to pull away customers? I don't pay that close attention because I rarely play games (especially modern games) anymore.
I think your worldview is just plainly wrong. It reminds me of friends who complain about how modern clothes are shitty and don't last but don't buy solid durable clothing. I buy unbranded quality clothes or lightly used well established brands and my clothes last yeaes. They buy trash for the namebrand or because it's cheap and then get mad as if they didn't choose to make that trade off. With basically any product you have a million choices (exceptions were already stared, mainly in government backed monopolies or high barrier to entry markets). I can't really take the "Products are getting enshitified!" meme seriously when I can literally just go on google and find you an equivalent product for basically anything you ask for. Assuming you're in America, that is.
You really seem to buy into the "corporations only look at the next quarterly report" meme way too much. Amazon and google were not profitable for like a decade because they just kept reinventing their revenue. There are some cases where investors punish long term thinking (recently Intel) but I would say it's really not the norm, at least in growth industries.
Yes, I in fact have downloaded and played several of the games Epic gave away.
The storefront they have is simply not a serious enough draw where, given the choice to buy a game on Steam vs. Epic, to really go for Epic instead.
And Steam has not taken a single action that has made me feel mistreated or punished for loyalty. Its their game to lose, as the user numbers tend to show.
EDIT: I hopped on Epic Games to see what free games they were offering. They have Rogue Waters, a pirate roguelike game that looks right up my alley! Epic Game store shows it has a 4.1/5 star rating. Not bad.
But I hop over to Steam and I can IMMEDIATELY see that it has "mostly negative" recent reviews, which indicates a possible problem! I read one recent one and it says:
That is EXTREMELY relevant information, and if it weren't literally free, I'd probably not buy it based on that review... which Epic wouldn't have shown me.
STEAM IS JUST THE INHERENTLY MORE CONSUMER-FRIENDLY PLATFORM.
WHAT IS STOPPING EPIC FROM IMPLEMENTING THE SAME SYSTEMS?
/edit.
Love to hear that! If I can improve my worldview its a benefit to me.
Not convinced, though, since this model of things has been extremely predictive of corporate behavior and has actually shaped my own behavior as a consumer to try and 'reward' those companies that actually maintain a standard of NOT treating consumers like cattle.
I'm mostly focused on products where they've managed to achieve the 'efficient frontier' on exactly how little quality they can produce such that the average consumer no longer notices or cares, whilst maintaining a similar price point as they've had all along.
Its been done with movies, with cars (although there are of course luxury brands if you DEMAND quality!), with food, and its ubiquitous with tech.
Shrinkflation is a known tactic used here as well.
I mostly blame the fact that people have very short memories so even if they notice that the quality of something is kind of poor, they won't realize that anything has been lost since they can't remember the before times. And they won't readily recall the poor quality when it comes time to buy new.
Me, I have an extremely sticky memory. I hold grudges, I remember details about people's behavior at critical moments, I remember when government official did things that betrayed their constituents. So I'm just particularly sensitive to the tactics at work in the corporate world.. But on the flip side, if a company (Valve) consistently treats me 'well' I am happy to reward them with loyalty.
...
Who was the primary owner of Amazon shares for the duration of that unprofitable period?
Do yah think the fact that the original founder maintained centralized control for the majority of the company's lifespan might have helped its overall approach to long-term investment? Is that possible?
This is precisely and exactly my argument.
Amazon is, however, an example of an enshittified corporation by now. At least their website is. Lots of knockoff products with relatively poor quality control, and the search is less functional, the return policies are less friendly. The review system is manipulated, both by the site and by scammers. I accept this may be due to customer abuse, of course.
I have not had a Prime membership for about two years because They introduced ads into the 'free' tier of Prime Video. Yes. I am that petty. Their logistical empire remains unmatched, I do admit.
Steam has of course never done that to me. The search function works marvelously, they give you a great review system to judge the quality of products, and has the nicest refund policy in the business.
Google is arguably a true pioneer of the enshittification process, which DOES leverage its nigh-monopoly status to engage in anti-consumer practices.
Again, if you have a specific metric that we can apply that might capture the phenomena, I'm happy to examine and discuss it.
Do you have any examples offhand of a company that was becoming horribly mismanaged and driven into the ground that managed to make a massive turnaround WITHOUT it being taken private by interested parties?
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