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Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Xatolos@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 123 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I'll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism

I believe as long they’re not publicly traded )and Gabe is in charge), that’s not a concern.

Being public (or owned by a publicly traded company) tend to bring out these nasty traits. It’s more about finding ways to bring value to shareholders than the customers.

[–] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 89 points 2 months ago

Private companies can be dicks. Public companies can and will be sued by their shareholders if they aren’t big enough dicks.

[–] cobysev@lemmy.world 45 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He's been amazing for the company and I don't trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don't invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they'll change over time, but I've been so happy with Valve that I've gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don't know what I'm gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I've bought, because that's a massive library to lose.

I've never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam's functionality, I won't ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we're not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That's what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam's store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That's how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I've been a Steam loyalist ever since.

[–] snooggums@midwest.social 13 points 2 months ago

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.

There were a few older games I owned that had trouble with running well on newer hardware because of the messy manual updates. Did the seriel bumber i to steam and it installed and updated to a smooth running version on steam at no cost.

Yes, this tied the hard copy to the steam account so there was a loss of reselling unless they changed that at some point. But I never bothered with selling used games and these were old enough that nobody wanted them anyway so I got some free use out of something I was almost ready to throw out.

[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.

WAIT WHAT.

Does this happen even if the game wasn't on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

I really hope GabeN has a continuity plan that involves a nonprofit governance board when he's no longer in the picture. I don't even want to imagine valve as a publicly traded company (or owned by a private equity company for that matter.)

[–] Phen 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Anyone in charge of a non-publicly traded company will want to do what's best for the company in the long term instead of milking as much from it as fast as they can, so I don't think that replacing Gabe by someone else will be the end of Valve like so many people claim.

[–] phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 months ago

The problem is that you can never be certain about someone's ability to stand their morals atop money until it is truly offered to them. Supposedly Gaben has turned down Billion dollar offers for steam. It is certainly not every person who will do so and it is hard to know how a person will react until that is truly offered to them. I don't know that I'd turn it down (though I also don't know how much Gaben makes).

[–] Damage@feddit.it 9 points 2 months ago

Not necessarily. Sometimes even owners just want to milk as much as possible as fast as they're able.

Source: life.