this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Shareholders ruin everything.
Gabe can see that profit line plateau and knows he's still got more money than him or anybody else in the company would ever need.
A shareholder sees it, and dumps shares for something with better growth. And since it was all a fucking bubble, none of it was worth a tenth of that, so now a bunch of greedy CEOs panic and shit everything up in order to protect their own wealth.
When is the bottom going to fall out, though? Gabe is going to die in the next couple decades most likely, and although I've heard his son has a similar mindset to him he could sell Valve or he could pass away. Then I think the gaming industry is going to go to complete shit, and it's possible we could all lose our steam libraries worth thousands of dollars.
It's not just possible. It's inevitable.
We allowed Gabe and others to kill physical ownership of games.
We need rights to actually own it, and nobody seems willing to grant us that. If I can't trade my license to somebody else, I don't own it. If I can't play it when the servers are gone, I don't own it.
Well, I can tell you if I lose access to my steam library I'm pirating every single one of my games onto my harddrive.
I'll wager that when that happens you'll no longer be able to actually buy 99% of those games anyway.
The good thing is taht the standard steam drm is so easy to break that all of the games that just rely on steam for drm can be cracked without much work at least for single player.
Time to make valve a coop then.
We do need new paradigms of ownership. Ultimately, corporate entities can be democratic, if the shares are distributed to many people and not concentrated in the hands of a few. What would happen if everyone just bought into it? Player owned company? It could be done.
I think what you're describing where the owners are the users/clients/members is called a mutual, but yeah co-op, mutual, non profit, etc structures all are better options. and if you need to go with a c-corp or not, unionize.