[modeless]

If you measure success by how happy your most disgruntled employees are, maybe it doesn't look good. But if you measure success by revenue, profit, or quality of products, it looks incredible. Valve has succeeded in a very competitive industry and consistently released top quality products over a period of almost three decades.

I don't buy people's excuses about them just exploiting a monopoly. Epic was gunning for them, Microsoft was gunning for them, all the big publishers tried to compete on PC game distribution, consoles try to take market share from PC, GoG and others exist. The failure of their competitors to unseat them doesn't mean Valve had it easy.

Google, on the other hand, is what you get when you try to optimize for employee happiness across the board. Their business has been successful (the monopoly argument seems more applicable in this case, at least in the last decade), but product quality is in the toilet and employee happiness ultimately couldn't be maintained in the face of bureaucracy and layoffs.

[kevingadd]

It's important to recognize however that Valve has a history of being very slow to ship product, and financially is supported by the existence of Steam alongside lootbox bonanzas like CS:Go and DOTA 2. Those are successful products, so by no measure is Valve a failed company, but compared to most other successful game studios their ability to ship a completed product is very poor - if you look at their track record, they release a few full-size games per decade and then some of them end up failing. Comparable studios with their staffing and budget can typically release double their number of games without whiffing on quality - look at From Software, for example, which delivers hit after hit with ~equivalent staffing on smaller timelines and smaller budgets.

It's true that a product shipped early is bad forever, but a product never shipped is certainly not a success by any metric either.

My suspicion is that the way the studio runs means that the stuff they eventually ship is high quality, but a lot of potential smash hits wither and die because of process dysfunction and staff attrition.

On the other hand, if you're a successful middleman taking 30% of everyone else's revenue, you don't really need to be good at making games anymore. You can leave that business if you want.

[jchw]

Unlike most other middlemen that take revenue though, people legitimately are willing to choose to pay Valve on both sides of the transaction, despite a relatively level playing field. I choose Steam when I don't have to, even if it costs more, because the service is simply the best. I like what I get from Steam. Pending the lawsuit about anti-competitive behavior, which I think would definitely harm the argument that people simply prefer Steam a great deal, I honestly do generally just believe Steam actually does bring enough value to justify the relatively high price tag.

I actually also believe that Google Play and Apple App Store as marketplaces also provide "enough value" to potentially justify a fairly high price tag, but in their case it's not actually fair because the problem is that nobody else is even allowed to try to provide similar value at any cost. For example, both Google and Apple provide "free" push notification infrastructure, which is sort of necessary: if everyone was running push notification infrastructure, it would be pretty bad for battery life. However, the net effect is that you're being forced to price all of the value that they provide as platforms, into their marketplace, whether or not your app needs or wants their "value", and that's the problem. This doesn't quite compare to the situation with Steam, and I think that warrants more recognition.

Frankly, Steam sucked ass when it first came around. It was relentlessly mocked, and the only reason people tolerated it was because you needed it to play Half Life 2. But... they never stopped improving it. And frankly, even if this makes Valve a "worse" company from a position of investors and onlookers, it has made Valve a better company for consumers to be able to trust. It's pretty obvious that not every product or service Valve puts out is fantastic, but in the same token that things which are easy at "normal" companies are impossible at Valve, things that are impossible at normal companies appear to be possible at Valve.

I hate to romanticize it too much, but I'm not even a huge gamer, and I still feel like Valve has done very well by most of their consumers and developers. If anything, the biggest trouble they seem to have is deciding how exactly to moderate/censor the Steam store, given all of the different external pressures. Now that is a tough problem and they've had a tough time figuring it out.