Comment by zamalek

The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.

And loot boxes in Valve games never bothered me, because if you want a particular skin you can just buy it off the market. I can't remember being angry at Valve for having loot boxes.

All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.

They've hedged their bets by making, and selling, both games whose monetization is exploitative and non-exploitative

TF2 hats used to bring an advantage until about a decade ago.

> and give refunds so they get a free pass.

They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.

I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:

Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.

Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.

Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)

Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!

So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.

Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.

I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.

Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/gabe-newell-leviathan-superya...

The same api users use?

there are worse capitalists to give money to

Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.

DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.

I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".

Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.

My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.

It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.

Steam isn't always-on DRM. For instance Valve's own games don't have any.

Their worst failure is allowing games with Denuvo on their store.

lice

Steams default landing page can be changed in Settings -> Interface -> Start Up Location. Setting Library skips the store when opening. Steam

My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.

The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.

Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.

With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).

The tyranny of structurelessness

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

This isn't about valve specifically

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne....