Report: Are Valve and Steam Worth Billions?

[tommysch]

[citation][nom]bluekoala[/nom]What he means is that as long as Valve is private, it will act on benefitting the WHOLE gaming indusrty. No just act on behalf of profit for shareholders. Publicly owned companies are as heartless as all of us combined can be.[/citation]

If they go public I well sell my account ASAP. Anonymous analogy?

 

[squallypie]

The whole point is, steam did a great deal of favor to the gaming community. I hope they grow bigger in the gaming industry and just integrate physical retailers with their business, so they can act like steam's merchandise stores or something. I mean, those retailers are COMPLAINING about steam.

Steam could also work on making Linux more gaming friendly. This would do a great deal to people. There is a huuuuuuge untapped market out there, and to give them computers it should be cheap. Which means cheaper OS. And linux could be the right person

 

[userman]

[citation][nom]Travis Beane[/nom]As much as I love you Steam, you're still not perfect. -The Steam client is pissing about offline mode (fine if you logon first, then disconnect, but not if you start disconnected).-DRM.-If I lose my account, I lose all 110 games I have purchased through Steam.-Support. It'd be a hell of a lot easier if I had 1 page for support for all of my games, not 50.-If all games had settings/saves in the cloud, not just the dozen there currently is.-Selling broken games (or multiplayer games with no servers).If Valve can fix those issues they have, I see a great future for them. For the time being, I only buy from Steam because it's usually cheaper than Impulse.[/citation]

1. Net-I agree with the off-line connectivity thing being a pain, but i guess most, if not all digital distribution systems have a 'login even if you play off-line' mode, this includes windows live, d2d etc, so i believe valve is not alone in that(come to think of it i cant even play on consoles without signing in...😛)
2. DRM- Really among all the digital distributors i bought games off, valve has the least intrusive DRM i know off, its easy to switch pc's or even install the games either from your DVD/External HDD back up or d/l again from steam, even when you format your pc multiple times, and best thing no need to get customer support involved in it!!
3.A/c-What the previous commentor Elbert said is true, i have had my account restored with a easy 'mail us the scan of your bill and its back again service'
4. Support-This sounds great but i don't think valve can give the level of support the game makers/publishers can give, to have them all pitch shops at valve with their own custom space to reach to the players who have troubles is i guess a better option, though valve does take an active role in integrating patches and updates and making sure all of those games work as smoothly as possible through steam
5. Custom Save-Have to agree completely on this one, would love to have a space for account holders on steam to upload their own custom saves/settings to the games they play, would make the format/reinstall process that much more smoother
6.Sell-I believe there is an option to gift the games you bought off steam to another steam owner, not very clear on the details but it sure is an option, i have had my friends buy special off bundles and then gift the game they had to someone else.

I'm a old time valve user so hope this clears some stuff about them...cheers!

 

[rhino13]

It's great to see what a company can do while it supports solely PC gamers and treats them as honest citizens not thieves.

 

[gm0n3y]

If Gabe wants money, just have an IPO. I'd be the first in line to buy some stock. I remember the first time I used Steam (must have been ~8 years ago now) I said that this was going to be the future of gaming and that if I had the chance I would invest a ton of cash into that company. If only I had the chance, I'd probably be a wealthy man by now.

 

[rpgplayer]

wtb a steam client for linux!!!

 

[psycho sykes]

I really hope that the day when they are forced to sell doesn't come...

 

[eddieroolz]

I think Valve should be staying independent. With the amount of revenue it's raking in, I'd say they have no incentive to sell out at the moment.

 

[belltollsforthee]

LOL nice one dude
"I think smaller companies get better work done, cause some corporate suit isn't breathing down their neck all the time with crap about why their productivity metric is down and how they are not capitalizing on the growth rate expenditures of their target market, thinking outside the box, brainstorm, SAP, visualization, Web 2.0, meaningless catch word, blah blah blah. You know, the same crap upper management always spews out."

 

[mayankleoboy1]

all of us know what valve time means, but whatever you say, any poduct they make is top-notch and lead the pack.