It seems increasingly unlikely that Good Guy Valve ever existed. Steam looked very different in 2004 Reddit
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But beneath the glassy smile of Good Guy Valve today lurks an altogether more cold and corporate beast, a textbook rent-seeker that is profiting from both hostile practices and a bizarrely customer-supported near monopoly on PC game sales. Perhaps Good Guy Valve did exist, at one time. How could it be, with its fierce and innovative vision for digital distribution, its stable of influential first-party titles and its approachable, meme-friendly CEO? "Look," we said to each other, "you can send Gabe Newell a funny email, and he may respond with a joke! What a good guy. Valve didn’t always seem like the sort of corporation which thought of its customers as meaningless numbers in a colossal profit machine.
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They’d not only be caught dead before helping a company like that come to power, they might even join the resistance to stop them.Īnd yet, that sort of operation is exactly what the PC gaming community has been supporting, promoting and defending since 2004 when Valve more or less forced us to install Steam by bundling it with Half-Life 2. If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation.
Whether this means government regulators finally getting their act together, unions winning court cases or citizens voting them out of town, these companies are starting to feel the downside of moving fast and breaking things. The world is finally realizing that a hands-off, profit-first, tax-dodging “connection and services platform,” powered by the cheap labor of people who aren't technically employees and have no rights isn't exactly a good idea. It’s a good match for the ship-first-iterate-later approach of major Silicon Valley companies who want to expand at all costs and don’t care what it takes.īut companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Fiverr and the others are starting to feel the risk of that edge. We want nothing more than to run our ridiculously powerful rigs on barely stable beta drivers, with our CPUs overclocked to speeds that are neither advisable nor guaranteed to be safe for our systems. The drive to be on the bleeding edge of technology powers the PC gaming community. More on how Polygon writes opinion pieces. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization.
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