I apologize if this post is not well structured.

I recently went down memory lane and saw some Gabe Newell clips. He seems like a decent guy (which is not an argument btw it’s just me pointing it out) and Valve seems like a decent place to work for (also not an argument).

Valve is a private company, with no stock to trade (no shareholders etc) and for most of its time existing it’s worked as a “company with no hierarchy” in the words of employes, as in you could work in a project this week and another project the next, without any upper management telling you what to do (although from what I could gather there’s still organization, just not in the way you’d expect).

While I do understand that private businesses are inherently exploitative and as a communist I seek to abolish such structures in favor of communal structures, am I wrong or misled to see companies like Valve Software as a major step up in comparison to others like Microsoft, Apple and the like? Of course it’d be amazing if it was a worker cooperative, for example, but Valve offers amazing services and products for customers all while not destroying its workers, even though it’s basically a monopoly in the PC market at this point. I also think most of this is due to Gabe Newell’s visions as well as employee feedback, but I have no evidence to back this.

Also, the biggest socialist experiment of the 21st century is China, and some similar company structures formed (like Huawei, for example, although it’s not 100% the same). At least in my naïve view this is a big step up from the big multinational corps, like Nestle, Coca Cola, Microsoft etc.

Anyways: I could always be wrong. Please share your thoughts on this.

Thank you for taking your time to read this and cheers from Brazil!

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    14·
    4 days ago

    I think Valve benefits from being a private company (which allows it to retain its autonomy) while running a relatively tight ship where the engineers highly skilled. This combination of autonomy and skill with the money from having a monopoly on PC gaming lets them do some nice things. Because they are a private company they haven’t been compelled to cannibalise their consumers yet, though I can’t speak for vendors who use Steam to sell their games. For a big company their approach towards hardware and software is sort of a silver lining in today’s world. Their contributions to Wine and Proton have elevated gaming on Linux. Their hardware like Steam Deck is extremely open both in terms on the software you can run and the repairability.

    This is not to say that Valve is not explooitative. Their workplace is made to sound like a paradise but I can guarantee you you wouldn’t have much influence if you are a woman there or from some other minority demographic. Valve has made a ton of money from selling lootboxes which are a prominent entry point for children into gambling.

    Valve is an outlier where their monopoly and their expertise has allowed them to remain “nice” in spite of being massive. It’s not a set of circumstances that can be replicated. It is possible that one day even Valve resorts to enshittification. But thankfully it is not an imminent threat seeing how terrible the hacks at Epic Games and Microsoft are at creating a video game storefront.