I wonder how many criticisms of "capitalism" would go away if the Ford v Dodge ruling was repealed.
@Hephaestic Even though his company never went public, Gabe Newell could be considered a role model given that he nearly monopolized the PC market yet he rarely receives criticism outside of the DRM-free and FOSS purists.
Gaben is definitely one of the better CEOs by simple virtue of locking himself in his office and playing DotA2 all day as opposed to actively making things worse like so many C-suite executives are driven to do. Though we cannot forget nor forgive Valve as a whole for normalizing loot boxes through Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
Steam does also have a semi-obvious censorship bias due to how they've handled controversial games like Hatred, or unevenly enforced rules for anime/hentai games.
@Hephaestic He's not perfect (I mean Steam is still DRM and proprietary spyware) but he seems to be the go to example of when people talk about why it's better not to be a publicly traded company.
>Steam does also have a semi-obvious censorship bias due to how they've handled controversial games like Hatred
They later backed on Hatred though. I can't speak for anime/hentai games however because I don't play them. They are a lot better than GOG when it comes to content policy. I mean, that's the number 1 thing holding GOG back, at least in my opinion.
Yes, definitely. I cannot imagine how miserable PC gaming would be if there weren't essentially an ethnostate at the top of it putting resources into solving the problem of gaming on Linux. God knows Linux programmers wouldn't take care of it.
Backing down on Hatred was good, but for them to even consider blacklisting it just due to shitcoating is a big tell. There are a lot of small things that just get crushed in the gears of Steam's enormous bureaucracy and never see the light of day since they aren't public enemy number one during Gamergate 1.0. There have been a bunch of anime-styled games that get mysteriously denied for Steam approval, even while explicit porn games get a pass. I can only assume there's some power tripping janny with a closet full of CP working there.
I agree about GOG. They used to be a very nice place when all they did was focus on archiving and preserving old games in stable, user-friendly ways but they got ideologically captured by some blue-hairs and started firing people for tweets and trying to push GOG Galaxy into everything. I've used Galaxy and it's fine - perhaps even good - but I'm sure somebody there would be really happy if standalone installers were removed.
GabeN could do what he did and focus on long-term growth exactly because Steam never went publicly traded. Had he gone the public offering route, he too would have been forced to chase short term growth, or he would have been booted outside his own company now owned by investors.
It's predatory finance that establishes short term growth managerialism
You'd need to establish a generation of CEOs who actually give a fuck about their companies first, but perhaps it could be done.