I’ll be heading out of town tomorrow after getting off work. I have a doctor’s appointment a few hours away and it’s early in the morning on the 30th; rather than drive there in the middle of the night/early morning it seems more practical to stay the night. If I don’t post anything tomorrow that’s why.
Anyways, had fun tweaking one of my co-workers chains today. He was telling me about Valve not knowing how to spend money properly, and then made some quip about how it’s to please shareholders. When I pointed out that Valve is a privately owned company he got really angry for some reason and called Gabe greedy. He made it sound like Gabe, and Valve/Steam in general are a horrible company on par with companies like EA, and how all they do is collect money and not contribute anything back to the community. After pointing out all of Valve’s latest projects (Proton, updating the Steam Chat UI, VR, etc) I finally figured out where he was coming from. He was only looking at Valve’s lack of games being brought to the table, to the point of being absolutely bitter about only releasing a card game that won’t even be free to play. Which yeah, I won’t argue I’d like to see Valve actually make something again… but to say they’re not doing anything. I also had to laugh because he was reciting his rants as though they were actual fact, like Valve having shareholders. In fact it seemed like the more Valve facts I brought up the more quiet his voice became. He didn’t know that Gabe used to work for Microsoft or how he went to Microsoft asking for them to help fund Valve to get them off the ground only to be laughed at, he didn’t know Valve’s approach to projects being based on employee interest, he didn’t know about the working at Valve survival guide, and the list goes on.
I’m not a Valve/Steam apologist, there are plenty of things wrong that Valve needs to strengthen upon such as the storefront or their customer support. But to say they’re doing fuckall isn’t true. He even tried to compare them to Bethesda in terms of being similar… in what sense? That they now have yet another client they want you to install to purchase games on? I like Bethesda as far as their games go, but as a company they are more closed off, Valve on the other hand is much more open… perhaps a little too open (again referencing their store). I also don’t remember Bethesda paying attention to other operating systems, designing their own hardware or actually continue to patch their games over a decade later, or helping with open source projects. I told him about Wine (the Windows compatibility layer for Linux) and the Wine Foundation, and he wanted to know if they were a legit foundation. It was really difficult not to facepalm at that statement.
The whole thing made for a fun conversation though. Definitely a good source of entertainment. :trollface: