I love how you stated can, because we all know the hard truth. The only reason we get a decent product is because the people who run Steam aren’t fuckwits. When you get shit people with zero oversight running things…everyone gets fucked but the very top.
That's it. No doubt private companies can be every bit as villainous as publically owned, but at least they've got the option to not be.
Another dude replied to my comment with some info on the dark side of steam, and now that comment has been deleted for some reason, but I've written a reply to it and may as well post it here because it's relevant:
To deleted comment:
let's not pretend it's all good pro-consumer stuff.
Sure, let's not 👍
[Some interesting information about some mean stuff that valve have done]
That's interesting, and good to know. I didn't know, but if it's all true I'm not especially surprised, either.
Absolutely every industry of any decent size is throughly infested with staff who have gone through their entire careers (and lives) knowing nothing but the golden rule of "fuck as many dollars out of customers as you possibly can, everything else is secondary".
It's the driving force of managers, accountants, PR, you name it, and these people have a collective influence through their every action that is impossible to resist.
This principle has been the guiding ethos of business for so long now that frankly it's astonishing when there's any pushback at all, or any desire to prove something better than you can get away with, even though it's leaving money on the table.
I don't think any medium-sized or larger company can escape it anywhere near entirely, but the only ones who are effectively permitted to say "let's hold off on [specific article of enshittification] because we're in business to provide the [particular goal] and that has to come first" are private companies, because publically owned companies have a duty to shareholders which, in practice, translates to the thing I said before about fucking all the customers over in exchange for all the dollars.
Boards get replaced and shareholders bring lawsuits when there's money at stake, and the whole system is so entrenched in that pattern that no-one ever tried to push back any longer.
It's pretty wretched all round, I'll take any win we can get.
I don't know where you're getting this "privately owned companies are better" crap. I mean private companies can get away with way more malicious bullshit than publicly listed ones because unlike publicly listed companies, privately owned companies don't have to disclose their shit to anyone. Theranos was privately owned. Almost every major scam company was privately owned and that's why they were able to get away with it for as long as they did.
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u/FireflyOfDoom87 3d ago
I love how you stated can, because we all know the hard truth. The only reason we get a decent product is because the people who run Steam aren’t fuckwits. When you get shit people with zero oversight running things…everyone gets fucked but the very top.