this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent, and there's always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it's "supposed to" is still capitalism.
It's quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970's was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn't until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.
However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).
My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
It's not network effects (but slightly related), it's opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn't hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn't cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they'll drop you if you're small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They're big enough that many devs think it's worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that's what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co
Network effects and chill?
I think we're just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.
"Hi! We're valve. We're mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn't deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn't deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves" -- Hands down one of the best "big" companies out there.
Here's another way you can look at Valve.
They are a case study of how a privately held company, a company that does not have a boardroom of investors, demanding maximum possible short term profit, all the time...
Can actually allocate capital more efficiently, and generally more fairly, and innovate better than a ravenous hoard of interest/rent seekers.
You can look at them as essentially a counter argument to the modern American concept of a publically (stock market) traded company.
While what they do, the tech, the platform, the games... while that's rather cutting edge... the way they do it, that's actually old school, at the level of how a business fundamentally works, is legally defined.
They are not 'beholden to capital' so much as they are ... 'beholden to Gabe.'
You would think business majors and economists could look at this and go... oh, turns out capital markets aren't efficient, at all, in the long run!
We are at the point now where a privately held, effective monopoly / oligopoly is... actually less evil than basically every other major tech firm that is entirely investor-returns / capital-rent driven... where probably roughly 20%-40% of the people/orgs on all those other boards ... are just the same people, forming basically a de facto conspiracy.
Basically, being beholden to a single, publically visible capitalist, who doesn't have to show you his internal books... appears to be objectively better than being beholden to many, obfuscated, invisible capitalists, despite them actually having to show you their books.
This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn't work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Lumberyard, essentially a fork of CryEngine, is essentially abadoned and spun off into O3DE.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet... and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh... kind of let you do some extremely basic office work, awkwardly.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn't matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they're forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition from MySpace 2.0, into the gamified, data mongering, hypercapitalist hellscape attention based economy.
All mobile gacha games with massive MTX and gambling/loot box/dark pattern style mechanics can basically trace their lineage back to Farmville.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
I agree, it's easier to do it worldwide, but that doesn't stop companies from writing extra code to comply with local restrictions only locally.
Look at all the US companies where their websites function differently if you are in california or not.
It was a law, but they were by no means forced to be good about it and let everyone in the world benefit.
Everyone also seems to ignore that they started the lootbox epidemic.
While I won't defend that he could be much more altruistic with his money, but complying with different refund laws at a digital level is super easy to do. Even more so for Australia, since it isn't like anyone bouncing between country borders all the time there.