a fun fact is that Huawei is a cooperative

Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by 161,749 of its employees and retired beneficiaries. As of December 31, 2024, Mr. Ren’s investment accounts for nearly 0.65% of the company’s total share capital.

I think any praise directed at Valve should be directed at Newell.

Valve is a private company and therefore reflects the values of its owner.

Another similar example is Larian Studios and its owner Sven Vincke (sp?).

Both of these companies have done/are doing good things. But they don’t refute the criticisms of capitalism.

1. People like Newell and Vincke can create these privately owned companies with their wealth, but where did that wealth come from? I will applaud both those men for choosing to do good things but with the caveat that those decisions don’t exist in isolation and the acquisition of the wealth they needed to do cool things with their cool companies was definitely not an exploitation-free process.

2. What happens to those businesses when their owners retire/die? Valve and Larian are reflective of their owners, and their owners are swimming against the current. Capitalism rewards shitty behaviour, and ownership of those companies can easily pass to shitty people.

Valve is a blip in the system. It’s a good blip, but it’s not indicative of any redeemability in the capitalist system.

If you look at Valve’s Glassdoor reviews, you’ll quickly realize that the “work wherever you like policy” is a lie. It’s just another corporation that has a monopoly on selling games.

The interesting part, is that gamers often argue in favor of Valve’s monopoly. This is because it’s convenient to have all the games in one place, rather than having to cycle through multiple accounts and stores to play different games. It kind of defeats the liberal argument of competition is always better.

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.

in a capitalist society, private companies > publicly traded companies, there is more chance that the private company owner has some actual interest in whatever the company does and actually contributes to the development of production than the amalgamation of stock owners of a public company. Doesn’t mean that private companies are desirable tho since just like a private owner can be a progressive force, it could also be a reactionary private company. Another example of a good private company was ben and jerries before they got bought out.

needless to say, Valve will end up being a public company eventually, it’s just a matter of time really.

Valve isn’t good by any metric but it is a lot better than much of the competition.

This I think aptly describes the limits of what a corporation can be: not good but better than the next guy.

i.e. a lesser evil, but still evil

Valve directly enables the 3rd party betting sites for skin gambling etc, that and lootbox mechanics in Counter Strike etc directly target kids and are getting many addicted to gambling

I don’t know of a good text source on this I’m sure there’s some out there but this Coffezilla video Deception, Lies, and Valve does a great job of explaining how predatory Valve are and features some footage of Gabe(and its pretty short)

They are basically using Agile methods, which are typical in software companies. It has its advantages in the digital field especially but it does not change the underlying relation of production, that Gabe is the sole owner (I did a quick check on that but not too deep).

Stock options for employees are also not unheard of, though I think it’s more common in the US than outside of it. Basically employees get company stock as bonuses or reward, which makes them part owner but mostly means that they have a vested interested in the company’s success. It’s still majority owned by Newell.

Both agile and stock options are ultimately capitalist leverage on employees. Agile like I said does have its advantages in digital companies and it’s not so far removed from what we would like a workplace to be in socialism, but it’s also a way for companies to retain talent and employee motivation by giving them the option to work on what they feel like. Stock options also help with motivation and retaining employee (you might not want to sell your stock if you believe it will grow, but you have to sell when you leave, so you stay). Though in Valve’s case since they’re not publicly traded I don’t really get what good this stock does them, but I didn’t search too far either.

What Newell does well is actually implementing agile and not obstructing it with manager bullshit that feels scared they are losing control over the process. This is how agile is meant to work, but it’s also kind of a response to the old-school (1950s and up) rigid top-down pyramid structure, so ultimately it’s just another way to organize the labor of dozens of people, without speaking to what that labor is used for (in capitalism, to make profits).

For a company that makes so much so much money and has a monopoly they don’t particularly pay employees what you’d expect, it’s pretty much the average for the country and sector, between 60 and ~160k$ per year depending. All the nice bonuses that companies like Google offer like free catering, a gym on campus etc is so that employees will stay late at the office and not take their vacation days. Same with these companies that started offering “unlimited vacation days”, what people found was that when you were technically allowed to take a day off any time, they didn’t take any because they thought “eh, I can always take it later”

like Huawei, for example, although it’s not 100% the same

Companies like Huawei are a contradiction of China’s socialist market economy, or rather it’s their way of reconciliating the contradiction long enough to make it out and into the stage of socialism where they won’t need such companies anymore. Huawei is a wholly employee-owned company (workers coop) but not every employee is an owner, and they still compete against the global capitalist economy (ask a Huawei employee how many hours they work in a week haha).

So in terms of steps up, yes and no. It depends if you like that structure but ultimately in capitalism this structure is wholly capitalist. In China this structure is socialist market, and in the ussr it wouldve been state-owned socialist. I don’t think there’s any revolutionary potential there either by showing this type of structure works because the retort will be “well but if it exists in capitalism why do we need socialism”, but I could be wrong of course.

Great question from my gaming enthusiast perspective.

I agree with the other commenter in saying that a capitalist company is inherently exploitative and therefore evil. Is it possible that gabe has a communist ideology or tendency on vibes alone? Its possible but also there are tons of ways to make it better for the employees from a communist perspective. Mondragon is apparently an example of implemented socialist ideas in a company.

The mere point of paying people per hour is incredibly sinister. Keeping the product of their labor from the workers also is just plain evil from a communist perspective.

If he were are marxist, he would probably just share the profits with the workers and have them vote on strategy. Also, he is not doing any good by being a sole monopoly (although valve in that case just exists in the system which facilitates monopolies).

Its the contradictions we should look at. He gives some agency but not full, some good pay but not all, he cares about customers but doesnt reflect it in pricing, he could just price the games in a way that doesnt make any money besides the workers pay which would make games cheap as fuck, he could change that game studios must pay to make money and have certain requirements to make money.

I can go on all day because I’ve had this discussion before i became a marxist and since then its very obvious why I do think valve is better but still bad.

Thanks again for asking. Good idea imo.

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?

Not entirely wrong. For sake of argument I won’t address the actual shortcomings of Valve in practice as others already have here. I’ll take it that for some reason Valve is actually a great company, Gabe is some great man with a progressive vision, etc, etc for the sake of argument.

There have always been within capitalism elements, even capitalists who have done progressive things or gone against the worst impulses of capitalism in their time for various reasons including genuine personal belief and conviction as well as marketing and carving out a niche. The problem is such sentiment is never widespread, often has some sort of contradiction or caveat to it (something bad they do despite overall being so much better than anyone around them by contrast), and rarely lasts much beyond the lifetime and/or control of the particular people pushing it (Gabe and others at Valve who work there but have significant control of what they and the company do).

So to be even a liberal capitalist who thinks that the Gabe/Valve way is the way to some form of ethical capitalism is to ignore history. It is to wishfully say well we just need more ethical, progressive people leading companies when the system itself disincentivizes this at any scale and indeed when it is as hardened and calcified as capitalism with as many old money types who have so much capital and so much push in the system of capitalism that while you can stand out of their way and do your thing up to a certain size you can’t push them around, dislodge them, or dislodge how they’re engineering the overall structure and you remain a fluke.

Capitalism is the way it is for a reason. It inevitably moves in this given direction and you can’t stop it. It is its nature.

You mention China. China is different because they control the larger apparatus, they have a dictatorship over the capitalists and can use coercion and violence against them (and understand violence here doesn’t just mean beating them with a truncheon it also means the violence of the state, they can harass them legally, intimidate them, make their lives uncomfortable and unpleasant in ways that involve no physical blows) if they step too far out of line and the capitalists know and are constrained by this though some still push (Jack Ma) and have to be checked and put back in their place.

They take what? A 25% cut I think. And they aren’t shooting themselves into the foot loosing it to anyone else. Gaben needs his yachts.

Valve has to be a lot more worried about loosing customers than loosing publishers and studios, since there really isn’t another platform that comes even close in reach. But customers might leave for gog or whatever over small problems. This puts consumers into a pretty comfortable position.