Valve Prints Money

[@LegionIscariot]

One thing i love about Valve is that they own themselves. And hopefully it stays that way until the end.

[@Jaxv3r]

Hopefully it stays that way, even companies that wanted it, even with the recent leaks of Microsoft wanted to buy them.

[@zip3704]

What do you mean by them selves. They have shareholders/stakeholders just like everyone else. Biggest difference is they choose who can join.

[@TsukatsukiRio]

@@zip3704the thing is that they don’t need to rely on ads to survive, which is a privilege for them

[@arafat464]

They don't own themselves, that's not how corporate ownership works. They are owned by a small group of shareholders and have chosen not to publicly list their shares.

[@canadajones9635]

Yes, it is true that Valve has a small group of owners. What's special about that is that those owners can set a lot more non-monetary direction than the typical board of directors of a publicly traded firm. Not only can they apply their own ideals to the business, but they don't have to account for every minuscule shareholder and doing what's best for them. They're much more involved in the company, as compared to some random stock trader in Wall Street.

[@c0d3warrior]

The best about Valve: They have a money printing machine, yet they don't overly abuse it and just provide what the average gamer wants without any unwanted annoyances. In my books it's well worth a few % ontop of the game price. Dear Valve: Never change and don't be evil like the others. Long live King Gaben! 😎

[@FeniksGaming]

It is because they don't abuse it they have money printing machine lol

[@Frag-ile]

Unfortunately it is only likely to last for about as long as Gaben lives or remains in control of the company. The moment the reins are handed over to a successor they're going to try to put their mark on the company, change shit for the sake of change or increase profits to try to prove they're better. It's only a matter of time.

[@quintit]

eh, they like to change the UI and not let us toggle the legacy UI. Lots of wasted space, but whatever

[@GeneralZimmer]

As long as they stay private, they're assured to be like this for at least some decades. Then again, I personally have a grudge or 10 against quite a few public companies EACH.

[@GSBarlev]

​@@quintitIt's all CSS, though. There's a Decky plugin to apply completely new UI themes, and I think there are similar tools for the desktop launcher. Assuming you even want to use the launcher, because you can just launch the games directly by creating a shortcut that uses the Steam CLI.

[@1draigon]

It’s no wonder that Microsoft ACTUALLY wanted to buy valve It’s the same with Nintendo. Both have INSANE cash reserves and are not even close to losing money

[@GSBarlev]

When you're not publicly traded, you don't have to grow for the sake of growth. You can just find your niche and *be the best in it.* I wish more content creators were of that mindset and didn't expand their "brand" in unsustainable ways (not so much about LMG and more about, say, Mr. Beast).

[@1draigon]

@@GSBarlev the problem is Mr Beast isn’t stopping his growth either lol He isn’t doing it because he wants the most profit (I genuinely think that) He probably just has something in his brain that… needs him to be delusional lol

[@menace2society00]

valve does literally everything right, they are private, they dont try to push the envelope, steam itself has damn near a monopoly on the pc game marmetplace, and the steam deck was a perfect pc handheld. not too mention their rarely dropped but always smash hit games

[@kohicsgo]

why tf no one can spell such a simple word as lose

[@menace2society00]

@@kohicsgo some people just make typos lol why can't you just spell out 'the fuck'? how many licks till you get to the center of a tootsie pop?

[@joeldoxtator9804]

Valve single handedly stopped game piracy in its tracks. Back before the Valve store everyone I knew pirated games, now hardly anyone does because Valve just provides so much of a better service. Add on top of this that Valve is currently the ONLY way to play new games on release on Linux and you have a juggernaut for sure. They are invaluable and seem to understand the balance between providing service and profit.

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

Valve isn't the only way to play games on Linux, just by far the most user friendly. Some Linux nerds (myself included) will sometimes spend the time to make a game from other sources work, when we feel like it. But for the most part with how good Valve has been at making proton just work with no tinkering on a vast array of titles - they just have to be the goto answer, as you usually want to play the game, not play games with the computer so it will it let you...

[@asuperrandomguy8266]

​@@foldionepapyrus3441I think he means natively, sure you can use things like heroic and lutrus but that are work arounds

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

@@asuperrandomguy8266 Don't forget you can use WINE or Proton and the tricks for them directly on a game as well if you put in the effort. Launchers are not required, just some way to get the game files.

[@chis4530]

Single handedly stopped piracy? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA

[@asuperrandomguy8266]

@@chis4530 it don't stopped but compared with before the majoraty of people don't consider even risking using piracy

[@megaing1322]

Valve also has a large amount of trust by consumers (and to a slightly lesser extend, developers). If Valve is bought out, that would damage the trust and reduce the value by quite a bit... Meaning selling Valve to any of the big companies would guarantee that Valve is worse off, and no other company has a chance to actually buy valve.

[@Arjay404]

Especially if it's bought by a company as polarizing as Apple. I honestly can't even imagine how the two companies could work well together, they are so vastly different from each other. Usually you want to get customers of both companies to merge together, but considering that PC gaming is essentially non existent on MacOS and that Apple doesn't seem to care one bit about PC gaming and that gaming on MacOS is isn't great from the player point of view, I see no reason why the two customer bases would mix with each other. So they would buy it just to keep the two companies completely separate meaning there is no real benefit to owning both companies.

[@vizthex]

real af.

[@Spirrwell]

If a dumpster like Twitter could be bought for over $40 billion, I refuse to believe that Valve isn't worth at least three times that.

[@freedomgoddess]

exactly.

[@WeebJail]

just because elon bought it for 40million doesn't mean it was worth it though lmao

[@Zyphera]

He have said in interviews that the timing of his buying of twitter was really bad.

[@jensenraylight8011]

Putting Valve in the same sentence as Twitter is one of the most cruel insult in the whole mankind history

[@fix0the0spade]

In complete seriousness, with, Steam's near monopoly over PC gaming, nascent hardware business and IP library, it wouldn't surprise if Valve turned out to be a trillion dollar company. Just the value of Counter Strike alone must be eye watering.

[@annekedebruyn7797]

All that money and still no Steam Controller V2 in sight. :( Come on Valve, there are like 10 of us waiting for a refresh.

[@shadowflash0]

I am one of those ten

[@thetoasterisonfire2080]

The steam controller 2 is in there somewhere, but how long it will take for whatever prototypes they have lying around to actually become a product is unknown maybe infinity.

[@roqeyt3566]

Man what a coincidence seeing you guys here, any idea where the other 7 steam controller fans are?

[@justicefool3942]

I mean, this is the company that promised us Half-Life 2 Episode 3 15 years ago and we are no closer to it being a reality. Valve moves quite slow.

[@TAMAMO-VIRUS]

I imagine the work for the Steam Controller 2 went to the Steam Deck, which makes that technically the Steam Controller 2. So any up grade to the controller would be a Steam Controller 3. So... that's never gonna happen

[@1100ms]

Valve makes almost $500m a year off of Counter Strike alone. Ignoring everything else at steam (the Store, Marketplace, Hardware, etc,) you probably couldn't buy Counter Strike alone at that valuation.

[@SnifferSock]

That's insane!

[@SickPrid3]

how do you know they make 500 mil? you don;t 🙃

[@SilisAlin]

According to who?

[@Curiouzity_Omega]

I know they make lots of money of counterstrike BUT NO WAY IN HECK IS IT 500 MIL per year.

[@1100ms]

@@SickPrid3 very little incentive for me to reply since you probably don’t actually care, but for anyone else who’s curious, skin traders like Anomaly have tracked the number of loot boxes opened monthly for some time and that alone points to ~50m/ month in keys (required to open cases), which are not even the only revenue source from CS. Not to mention the 30% every time a skin or loot box is sold on the marketplace. The Counter Strike ecosystem is CONSERVATIVELY worth $500m a year to Valve. There are multiple articles online about this.

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

For a long time I was very anti Steam. I just didn't like the idea of buying a game online and never having physical media. But over the years ease of use won out and I have gathered a pretty solid Steam library. One thing that really made me look at them as beneficial was when they took over the online support for Borderlands. I bought Borderlands in a brick and mortar store. So it came with a DVD and playing online used, actually I don't remember what servers they used. Anyway after a few years the servers were taken down and though the game still worked the online experience wasn't there. Then Valve stepped in. They built a new server structure, improved the player lobby, made it easy to find servers and friends. It was a much better online service. Sure that's fine for their customers, but what about the rest of us? Well they released a validation tool. I downloaded and ran it and suddenly I had a verified copy of Borderlands in my Steam account. Steam didn't make any money by doing this. They payed for the development of the new and improved server structure, and they allowed people with a physical copy of the game to join in so we could play with our friends. The only thing they got was goodwill from a portion of gamers who wanted to play Borderlands online. Another thing that Valve has plowed money into is Linux gaming. And yes it ended up powering their Steam deck, but it has also helped all the Linux users who want to play modern games that not necessarily have a Linux port.

[@RandomWombleP]

While they did not make money directly a cynic would argue that they invested in future sales by getting you tied in to using their platform. Even if they did not get any subsequent sales from you the size of their platform is still bigger given them a larger foothold and more clout. Still something of this nature based on a strategy of long term investment and returns is arguably better for the customers than someone looking for a quick return. I say this as someone who is overall a fan of steam.

[@Moskeeto]

As great as it is that Borderlands still works online now thanks to Steam after GameSpy shut down, I would say Valve did all that work specifically for Borderlands. Steamworks has already had all those features for many years. It's one of the main reasons a lot of multiplayer games released there in its early days. Borderlands was simply updated by Gearbox to take advantage of Steamworks because it's easy to implement and has all the features gamers expect in their online experience. GameSpy shut down because they couldn't afford to keep servers up since no one was really using their infrastructure anymore. So Steamworks was the best alternative and the most reliable. Nowadays Epic has Epic Online Services as an alternative which is platform agnostic and allows for cross play. However, I don't trust Epic with a 10ft pole. Whenever they crash and burn, I guarantee all these new games implementing EOS will stop functioning online and developers are going to scramble to implement Steamworks instead.

[@Gamerboi99]

@@RandomWombleP Yes, they invested in future sales. That is NOT something a publicly traded company does. The minute a company goes public, they are (nearly)required to shift focus from "make money, even if it takes time" to "make as much money as fast as possible, regardless of possible future consequences". They have to listen to their shareholders, and most shareholders don't want 100 dollars in a week, they want 10 dollars now, and every day that follows.

[@chiknkeinnugeget6755]

@@MoskeetoEpic is not going to crash and burn. Did you forgot they have unreal engine? Even when fortnite dies, epic will be fine.

[@Hax187]

Gabe Newell is one of the richest people on earth. Valve has found a literal way to print money. They also spend nothing compared to what they bring in, the entire Valve team is 300 ish people and that includes people working on Steam and all their other games. They are genius for keeping the company private, and I hope it remains that way forever.

[@pi4795]

They don't need investors and they don't need to sell themselves for cash so yeah, no point in going public

[@Xyler94]

@@pi4795 As long as Gabe is at the helm. But if someone else is, and they feel extra greedy, they could take it public.

[@zombl337og]

i think it will happen at some point, but his imprint on an every growing STEAM will never be completely ignored@@Xyler94

[@gustavrsh]

This also means that they can simply hire the best people in the industry.

[@Lee-wh3ht]

@@Xyler94wtf gas valve done lately besides some vr games you can’t run

[@thatgreenfur6584]

It's amazing that Valve is such a valuable company considering it has less than 400 employees and no rigid management structure.

[@ambhaiji]

Up until something like 2019 Windows and every other game client didn't not have a way to screenshot in game. PrintScreen only saved it to the clipboard with you needing a third party software to automatically save it for you. Or do it yourself via Paint or similar. Something that every single player wants to do when they top frag the leaderboard. Valve is also a very consumer friendly company they way they hand out returns so easily is great I bought R6 Siege but the game itself doesn't allow to play above 100/150ms ping. I got a refund in minutes.

[@GSBarlev]

The bulk of their overhead has to be CDN-distributing 200GB AAA titles on launch is gonna stress out any infrastructure, but also just thinking about the fact that any game they've ever sold on the platform must exist on some server somewhere, even if no one has downloaded it in a decade...

[@Tonatsi]

@@GSBarlev Actually, their infrastructure is perfectly built for that, they already have a stupid constant stream of downloads, they can just forcibly reallocate some from everything else towards the AAA titles on launch.

[@gilbertplays]

​@@Tonatsiyeah the fact they are capable of streaming multiple petabytes of data per country per day shows how good their infrastructure are.

[@gerardmarquinarubio9492]

@@GSBarlev If it were only games... we are also talking about an old workshop mod released by a guy 10 years ago with 0 downloads and is immediately searchable and downloadable at any point from multiple CDN's at full bandwith.

[@rkhale02]

I think Valve is one of the few mega-large companies that i actually trust. They may do the gambling boxes and things like that, but even when they do it's quality. Release a game? It's gonna be played for the next 20 years, even when half the community goes to the next itteration. They do not release games like EA that are broken and full of glitches, they release a game that can stand the test of time.

[@unrighteous8745]

Let's all just forget about Artifact rofl.

[@Yafama]

@@unrighteous8745Artifact was just a wrong place wrong time + bad background research thing though. From what I heard the card game mechanics are relatively good

[@unrighteous8745]

​@@Yafama I played it at release and thought it was absolutely terrible. It failed for a variety of reasons, but as someone who enjoys many different CCG's, I thought Artifact was a complete visual mess and wasn't enjoyable to play or watch.

[@ggwp638BC]

Valve, the same guys who: - Let CSGO rot to the point that all Riot had to do was put another horse in the race to completely take over in weeks; - Went into the MOBA race with everything to be the favorite, ended up trashed by Riot and now sometimes updates their game once a year; - Somehow had Autochess in their hands and lost it to... Riot again... - Managed to not have Overwatch completely run TF2 over due to no merit of their own, as the game was a hellscape of bots fighting other bots and somehow Blizzard just lost a fight against an opponent that didn't show up; - Actively allowed and continues to "pretend to not see" skin casinos that abuse their audience; - One of the first to introduce lootboxes... and in a paid game... - I guess L4D counts? Still? Valve has their qualities, and as a store Steam is really good. As a gaming studio they basically live off the fact they hired people who made mods everyone liked and released one good game in 2004. Their last good full game release was in 2011 with Portal 2. Every since then it has been minor projects or updates (I wouldn't count CS releases as full games, but if you do, fine, 2012 and it launched like crap).

[@aftdawn]

@@ggwp638BC Valve, the same guys who: - Are making a completely new version of CSGO using Source 2 (the same engine that Half Life Alyx runs), so hype around the new game (even tho it's most likely going to be an update it's still a new engine) - Fair, ~2,000,000 for League of Legends vs ~600,000 for DOTA 2, can't argue with cold hard numbers - (no idea what your talking about here) - All i will say about TF2 vs Overwatch is, Very Positive reviews vs Overwhelmingly Negative reviews, bot's or not, people like TF2 better then overwatch, even if player numbers are lower - yea, they should really do something about the skin casinos - yes, they did do that, but it's not anywhere near as egregious as the loot boxes in other games - (what are you meaning by that, only L4D??? what about portal, portal 2, HL2, any of the other games made by valve?!) and that's to say nothing about their hardware like the Steam Deck, the Valve Index, the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, and even your claim of "their last good game" seems odd, HLA exists.

[@kodemasterx]

They all left the platform thinking that Steam was just a launcher, they came back crawling and begging for forgiveness from our Lord and Savior GabeN…

[@Lethalgarage]

Valve reached out to Respawn during the development of Titanfall and TF2 and literally asked them how they were doing the things they were doing in source. The answer was Respawn rebuilt most of the engine

[@LARVideos]

I wish Respawn had put that much effort into their VR Medal of Honor game...

[@vibaj16]

lmao yeah, Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends have both probably changed their versions of Source so much that they're probably at least as different from Source as GoldSrc is from the Quake engine

[@niks660097]

Respawn only changed "rendering", everything else i.e game logic tools, networking, servers etc is still source..

[@notjustforhackers4252]

I read recently that there are more third party companies and people developing Proton and MESA than Valves entire, on the books, employees. Don't forget Linus, Valve are not only in the hardware business, they've also built the software that is on it.

[@GSBarlev]

Bear in mind it's easy to inflate those numbers-technically I "contributed" to Proton once by forking and cloning the Proton repo and testing two hotfixes for a newly-released game (first one didn't work, second one did). That's kind of the advantage of promoting Open Source in a space like gaming where you have a bunch of nerds ready and willing to donate their time and clock cycles to get something they want working.

[@notjustforhackers4252]

@@GSBarlev Third party companies have paid employees, your point is still valid. Great isn't it.

[@GSBarlev]

@@notjustforhackers4252 Oh yeah. If you're only counting people paid to work on Proton, Gamescope, Wayland, etc. then that accounting should be easy. I do think you lose GloriousEggroll, though. He works for RHEL, but IIRC all the work he does for Proton GE (and Nobara, fwiw) is strictly on the side for him.

[@ewwitsantonio]

I pray that Valve doesn't go public. Blackrock and Vanguard and all those jerks would derail the company by buying up >5%, yadda yadda

[@roundtabledetails3307]

@valcaron lol so true

[@RiversJ]

Fingers in ear lalala? Huge institutional investors tend to be horrible shareholders where the board members they select tend to be well connected but useless industry washouts that couldn't hack it or simply empty suits who have zero surface contract with the industry to begin with.

[@odeball22]

No company in the world would have the purchasing power to buy valve no one.

[@codycast]

@valcarondon’t know who Tim pool is but what about what OP said is wrong? There are a few giant “blackrock” type funds that buy up large %s of public companies and turn them into politically advocacy groups to do their bidding. Why would anyone want that of valve?

[@codycast]

@@odeball22lol. Apple could buy them with money between the couch cushions.

[@Cimlite]

Valve *is* PC gaming at this point. For better or worse. I just hope Gabe Newell the best of health, because I dread to think what happens when he's gone. That's when the platform might collapse imo.

[@ayoCC]

it's possible to set up structures so that a company can live on and thrive, Zeiss is an example. They're very involved in their local university and city even. Valve can maybe do some sort of governing structure. It'd just be a problem if someone tried to get control. Maybe each major department has sort of autonomy, but they can come together to support a new endeavor. They can have a regulated funding structure or so idk

[@pi4795]

Yeah, man is rich af but he could put that fat in check and be a little bit healthier, it will be a big shock for the gaming industry if he leaves us

[@Firepulser]

honestly he'll probably create an AI version of his brain or something before he dies. Like in Red VS Blue.

[@Katatonya]

@@Firepulseror Portal

[@BattlewarPenguin]

Don't worry, nobody will take the memories we have of it, and we can surely enjoy what is to come. We may not know about the future, but we can be thankful for the things we have, have a nice one 😄

[@MrBasforce]

In my eyes as a customer, valve is worth so much more then apple can pay.

[@AdamLMore]

Not really true. Apple could purchase Valve easily. The entire gaming industry is valued at ~$250B, even if Valve was 30% (their cut on game sales) of all game related sales that would put them at $75B. If the gaming market is expected to double in 10 years, you could maybe argue that Valve AT MOST is $150B, which is incredibly high (and realistically multitudes over what they are actually worth). Apple at the moment has cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities worth roughly $165B. Given that insanely high estimate of $150B above for Valve and Apple’s resources, they could reasonably buy Valve (even at such a high price). Would Apple buy Valve? Probably not, it’s not really in their best interest.

[@borde02]

Valve achieves a value of around 40bio$ just considering csgo cases. The gaming market estimations might actually be wrong. No way valve is only worth 150bio$

[@borde02]

Additionally you are talking about a yearly gaming market revenue of 250 bio$, wich is totally different from actual value of the companies. Assuming valve makes 150bio$ from game sales, they would also make say 60bio$ more per year with the games they own ( mainly csgo and dota). So we would get a revenue of 210 bio$. In the gaming market the revenue multiple is around 8, so that would make valve worth 1.6T$, so nope apple can’t afford it. Dont confuse early revenue with valuation

[@AdamLMore]

@@borde02 Valve isn’t anywhere near a $1T market cap lol.

[@borde02]

@@AdamLMore They have no market cap since they are not pubblic. 1T might be excesive sure, but hundreds of bio could be more realistic. No one has any data about steam, but they bring in a shit ton of revenue and have low costs. The value of a company is also given by a revenue multiple, wich I estimated at 10x, but if they have low costs and you get a mutliple of 20-30 on the profit then you might even get a higher valuation. It all depends on the revenue/profit they make. Even assuming a 10bio$ revenue (which seems very low) you would get a valuation of 100bio$

[@jthoward]

Cost aside, I’m fairly certain that Gaben would never sell Valve

[@hadis5160]

You are probably true. He already makes enough money to never work again for someone else, and he is probably super proud of his creation.

[@Katatonya]

until he dies :(

[@eddiemate]

@@Katatonya GabeN's death will be the day gaming dies :(

[@xxxod]

@@eddiemate when gaben dies we will ship gaben 2 but sadly we wont be able to ship gaben 3

[@vibaj16]

Let's just hope Gaben finds a worthy successor

[@doublezeta4s]

Valve isn't a Monopoly because they aren't pushing others with similar services, it's because THEY ARE the DEFINITE Experience. Why Buy on another platform for the same price while receiving less?

[@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece]

I would disagree because of DRM, but Steam DRM isn't even mandatory on Steam. Baldurs Gate 3 being a recent example.

[@Spazza42]

Arguably there isn’t more they could do either, the Steam platform in its current build just works as well as it should. There isn’t anything they can actually add to make it better, it just works how it should.

[@WyattOShea]

And that's totally fine imo. If it ain't broke don't fix it kind of thing is how I see it. If they could make things a little more streamlined over the years/make ui potentially better then that's also fine too. @@Spazza42

[@TricksterRad]

​@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffecearguably it's not even DRM, it's literally just a library that allows games to interact with Steam. It's just that some games use it to check if you own the game and refuse to launch if you don't, or the library can't be loaded (but there's smartsteamemu for that)

[@charlielarson1350]

Valve literally lost a class action lawsuit in federal court over anti-monopolistic behavior this year..

[@waltuh6984]

even just csgo/2 prints tens of millions each month in pure profit

[@klein8697]

One of the reasons valve is the top dog is its stability, outisde investors might fuck it up with demands that rock the boat

[@chiffaonosu]

I mean, let's count some numbers (note: only using USD pricing as I cannot bother trying to find region-separated data for this) Baldur's Gate 3 released in August for the price of 59.99$. Several sources claim it sold 5.2 million copies by August 19th. If we highball and count all purchases by the US pricing, that's 312mln$ in purchases, where Valve took 93.6 million for themselves. (Note: SteamSpy has ownership numbers in 20-50million, but cba rewriting this with this in mind) And that's for one (though insanely good) game release. Even adjusting for regional pricing, their revenue from Steam alone should be in billions per year, and that's not accounting for Steam Marketplace and skins. Anything under hundreds of billions looks like a lowball considering this money printing machine they have going on

[@RyanSmith-on1hq]

There's no way Steam took the standard 30% on BG3. Larian would have negotiated a better deal. That's still a crazy amount of money to be taking in though, they rich af

[@smokyz_]

@@RyanSmith-on1hq Ye, doesn't steam lower the tax % as the more succesful your game becomes?

[@RyanSmith-on1hq]

@@smokyz_ Aye, that's standard. If you're a bigger studio you can negotiate a much better contact. I wouldn't be suprised if Larian had a 10-15% base rate, or something along those lines.

[@Zetheek]

@@RyanSmith-on1hq It goes by sales, they would be paying 20%.

[@vibaj16]

I heard that they make around 600 million dollars a year from CSGO alone

[@GSBarlev]

It's amazing how Valve's behavior is literally the opposite of rent-seeking-they charge you as a storefront (and take their 30% cut) and impose basically *no* limitations. Sell it through your own store as well? Your users can even sideload it into our launcher. Adult content? We don't judge! Don't feel like making it compatible with our Linux handheld? We (or GloriousEggroll) will do it for you!

[@unrighteous8745]

This is true, but 30% is very steep.

[@the_expidition427]

Pay for what you get

[@dusteyezz784]

@@unrighteous8745 30% is standard pretty much everywhere.

[@tuxinal5661]

unless your game has nfts in it (which is a good thing)

[@GSBarlev]

@@unrighteous8745 I wonder what percentage brick & mortar stores take. Not a defense, _per se,_ and Valve's profits show that they could afford to take a smaller cut (and we know that most brick & mortars couldn't). I'm just curious... ...enough to Google: yeah-it's 30%

[@monkeywithocd]

IIRC Valve once said they'd rather close down than sell the company to someone. The fact that they're a private company with seemingly no intention of going public is a huge reason why I've always admired them.

[@ADreamingTraveler]

They're people who care about the things they make and their company. Valve's actually made many games, some of which were fully finished that they refused to release because they didn't feel it was of a high enough quality to them. There is even a partially completed version of Half Life 3 that never was shown the light of day because they felt it wouldn't meet the crazy expectations HL3 has set

[@Denastus]

Markus (Mojang) said the same thing but look at where Minecraft ended up

[@powerfist1340]

I'm just going to reference Gabe Newells response when asked about the prospects of a Microsoft Acquisition: "Over my dead body."

[@vibaj16]

"Not that I'm aware of"

[@TheDoomguy3232]

Valve is the only company that I feel has kept that personal feel even though they are a mega Corp.

[@vibaj16]

probably largely due to their flat (ish) structure. Employees work on what they want. While this has several issues (like games taking forever to make because there are inevitably some parts no one wants to work on), it's probably a big factor of why Valve is so successful and loved.

[@Likely_Alucard]

I am just happy Valve is out there MAKING things. Trying things, Even though a lot of their adventures and experiments die, at least they go for it. Some things stick like their co-founding of VR, the Index HMD, and the Steam deck. I salute them for giving things a shot, and they are so consumer oriented. They make their products and services valued. They don't just horde cash, they put it to use

[@RCXDerp]

I'd do terrible things for an index 2.

[@rune261gaming]

The fact that its private its why its succeeding. When u r responsible for the company and not answering to greedy shareholders things are better. They know what they are and dont seem to be changing that.

[@pipeliner8969]

I am very curious what will happen with Valve after Gabe

[@GSBarlev]

When Gabe dies, the true brains of the operation, his assistant Caroline, will have her consciousness forcibly uploaded to the Valve mainframe. And that's when the deadly neurotoxin gets released. (and why you should never sniff your Steam Deck's vents ::inhales deeply::)

[@Deruzejaku]

I totally understand Valve not being open. No fucking investor can say shit about what they can or cannot do, so it makes perfect sense by my books since they know what they're doing. Going open because you could "gain" kind of virtual worth for some time could lead to more problems long term. Not to mention that valve is getting craptop of cash with very little effort anyway, with such high profits from simple game distribution, you don't need any investor cash to be filthy rich

[@dayanson6920]

I know Valve is technically a monopoly but they have proven time and time again that they are "good" at it. Other people try to come in knock them down but dont provide the substance Valve has. They literally are the embodiment of If You Build It They Will Come.

[@AstralDragn]

Monopoly implies that they're in this position by aggressively shutting down competition, which I don't think Valve has done. I mean, Valve doesn't even buy out other companies, their 30% rate has stayed the same since the store launched from what I know~ The only reason they might be considered that is because basically everyone that wants pc games wants a steam account because there are so many games and their policies aren't so annoying or uncomfortable that they can be tolerated.

[@dayanson6920]

@@AstralDragn yes that's why they are technically a good monopoly. Granted they are not doing the rest.

[@ThatDevMatOfficial]

⁠@@AstralDragnmonopoly doesn’t imply behavior, it only refers to the fact the a overwhelming majority of the market share for any particular market is controlled by a single entity. The idea that anti-trust legislation and monopolies in general has anything to do with consumer impact was a legal theory pushed by investment banks so they could create monopolies and weaken anti-trust laws.

[@orihalchon]

@@AstralDragn Exactly. It's very disingenuous every time anyone describes Valve as a monopoly, even if they add "near" or "technically" alongside it. Because there's no behavior in Valve's history where they even fit the Oxford definition of the word: || *_the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service._* _"his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs"_ ||

[@Xyler94]

@@AstralDragn People forget something. Being a monopoly isn't illegal at all. Like, not even close to being illegal. The illegal part of a monopoly is using that status as a means to bury competition. For instance, Valve can keep providing the best services and support for their customers, and keep being as awesome as they are now. What they can't do, is force PC games to only release on their platform just because "We're Valve, we have Steam, fuck competition". You cannot fault a company for being the best in the business, you can fault them for trying to snuff competition illegally.

[@walking_in_]

"Because they can't count higher that that, we don't know how many people work at Valve, and neither do they" Best quote so far

[@JohnsonJohnsonJohnson-j6r]

Valve is so massive, the experience with them is way better than anyone else. I hope they never sell out

[@OrionKaelinClips]

The only thing Valve is bad at is making a sequel with an actual 3 in the title.

[@alexp6013]

Wow ! How did you get that character in your comment ? It looks like a 2, but like... 2 of them mirrored vertically... Is that Unicode of an alphabet I don't know ?

[@runescapefan0001]

​@alexp6013 it's >2 but

[@vibaj16]

@@alexp6013 It's an 8, but some of the pixels in your screen are dead

[@davidpomerantz]

If there's a Steam deck 2 then we can expect it to be the last one

[@mattp2tommy]

Steam Deck X

[@GSBarlev]

Nah. Remember that the Deck runs Steam OS 3 and that Steam OS 3.3 was when the experience got _really good._ Then again, 3.4 was a dumpster fire and 3.5 has been delayed _forever_ so it does seem like Valve might have trouble counting...

[@andygray9285]

Rofl

[@the_undead]

Why? I don't see any reason to believe that we will get no more hardware updates ever again. Maybe this will be the last steamed deck for a while, but definitely not ever

[@SignumCruxis0]

​@@the_undeadYou missed the joke, unfortunately, they are talking about valve and their inabilty to release a 3rd sequel if a franchise (HL, L4D, Portal...

[@floppy3962]

Don't forget valve gave 10k to every employee in 2020 like it was nothing

[@justicefool3942]

$10k to roughly 400 employees is $4 Million. To Valve, that's a rounding error.

[@floppy3962]

@@justicefool3942 it's also like 10% the value of ubisoft

[@stylinsandwich]

​@@justicefool3942thats like a week of their csgo profit

[@thientranduc-pu2nn]

​​@@justicefool3942Dang, I wish I had that problem 😂

[@Xyler94]

@@justicefool3942 But to their employees, that's awesome. It's a rounding error yes, but what's a rounding error to keep your employees happy?

[@BruhBruh-nt1xl]

What's funny is that Valve ain't even trying to topple Epic down and yet, they still destroy them while Epic is stuck with either NFT scams or Fortnite

[@A1stardan]

Epic gives free games every week to top it off to try to best steam

[@stokbrood]

Epic is aggresively trying to take down a "monopoly", so they themself can become an actual monopoly

[@Beastintheomlet]

Twitter was bought $44b and has never been profitable nor had a path to being so. Valve makes crazy money, and their costs are likely pretty reasonable.

[@Ichibuns]

There is good reason Nintendo is paying VERY close attention to the Deck and Valve. It's not because they expected the Deck to suddenly bankrupt them. Or even make a noticeable dent in sales. They're afraid of it's growth. They'd be stupid not to watch Valve carefully.

[@DNA912]

my mind is blown now. I've always known steam was a money printer for valve, and such. But I've never really thought long about how valuable the company actually is. I feel like they are one of those things that just exist in the background and you don't really think about that often, because you don't notice them in the same way like many other companies.

[@vibaj16]

I wouldn't be too surprised if they're worth over 50 billion dollars by now. CSGO alone has been estimated to make Valve around 600 million dollars a year. Then add the 30% of the profit they get from the games on Steam, which are over 70% of the entire market of PC games. Then take into account the value of all the behind-the-scene research and development Valve has done and continues to do, and all their genius employees (over 300 of the around 10000 worldwide that could ever work at Valve).

[@TheYoutubeUser69]

valve is crazy and it is hilarious that theyre private and we dont even know HOW crazy they are

[@prime_comando]

If EA market cap is 30B, then Valve is worth 65B easy.

[@A1stardan]

Microsoft could have bought EA, WB, ubi instead of Activision

[@Maadhawk]

If Valve was to offer an IPO, I would be SHOCKED if they didn't hit a $100 BILLION valuation within the first week.

[@RCXDerp]

I feel like that would be low the revenue from steam has to be in billions.

[@hanro50]

Valve, under it's current leadership, will never go public. Valve was formed in a time when a lot of companies went public and they're fully aware of the pitfalls involved with that. Going public, as far as I am aware, would violate some of Valves internal principles I believe. So, for the foreseeable future and as long as Gabe is alive, it will never happen.

[@vibaj16]

I fear what'll happen when Gabe dies

[@s4uss]

@@vibaj16 Yeah I fear Steam is gonna turn into the average publicly traded disaster for consumers when Gabe dies.

[@Uryendel]

They also have no need to go public, they don't need investment and gabe have probably more money than he can spend

[@NeoHellPoet]

It's not just that they don't know, they can't know. A private company is worth what it sells or what it IPOs for. With revenue, profit, debt and cash reserve numbers you could estimate what it should sell or IPO for, but we don't have that ether. Because Valve also has assets that are non tangible like the Half Life, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal and other IPs, that currently aren't being utilized to their potential even if you had all the hard numbers, you would still have massive x factors. And with an IPO, you also have positive market sentiment. A big, trusted name attracts lots of cash even if the results are only hypothetical (see CD Project Red pre Cyberpunk release and then immediately after) But also if they sell, buyers have to pay a pretty hefty premium over fair market value, because obviously they want the company so there's demand but the supply is 1 Valve available for purchase so it's more a question of how far a buyer can be pushed.

[@Mystrei]

I find it cringe when people unironically say they fanboy over any company or game. But I can confidently say that I’m a Valve fangirl for life, one of mega corporations that I actually trust and feel their positivity over their passion and projects

[@thomasdrysdale4240]

Worth noting, GoldSrc was for early Valve titles like HL, Source was for HL2, CS and Left for dead, Source 2 is the new engine and is used in HL Alyx and CS2

[@MichaelE6300]

imagine what they could be worth when they learn the ability to count to three

[@BrownFoxWarrior]

Despite my initial reluctance to finally buy games without a physical disc on Steam, Valve is now about the only company I have good faith in. Their impact is just so enormous that anything happening to them will be felt across the whole PC gaming sphere.

[@goxy287]

and lets just consider that gabe would never sell it

[@LaughingOrange]

Hopefully he has a plan for when he passes on. We've seen heirs ruin huge private businesses before.

[@GSBarlev]

​@@LaughingOrangeThe good thing about founder-led companies is that they tend to inspire a special kind of company culture. The same way Luke (and now Terren) could have taken over as the face of LMG if Luke had gotten hit by a car (and Yvonne had been behind the wheel I guess), I'm betting that Valve has an Employee No. 1 who could take over running the Cult of The GabeN.

[@VenomPulse]

I remember a estimate from a year or two ago that talked to people inside valve, they placed Valve somewhere around 200 billion to 600 billion if anything Im waiting for Valve to announce they are buying Unity.

[@MrPlaner]

So what you gotta realize, is that Valve not only takes % from sales. Not only do they have their own games on the Steam store. And even earlier, there was hardware that Valve put out (with cooperation from Alienware among others). There's also the whole ass MARKET, with cards, items, cosmetics, *all* with Valve's cut in it. Amount of simple CS:GO boxes sold daily is in high millions, each and every single one of those transactions is with cut to valve. And it's only one of the many, many games that have the market. Of course people can drop items, card packs and other things, but it still does not hinder Valve's money printing capabilities.

[@MRantroad]

Trading cards is just plain money printing for valve. Give user free card for playing game. User must trade/buy cards from market to craft badge, that have no real value. Valve takes a cut from all items sold om market. Valve get money from users wanting shiny badge and other users get money they must spend on more items from steam that valve take a cut from.

[@Xyler94]

@@MRantroad And it's up to developers to enable trading cards. Not all do. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't have trading cards.

[@lovetekman]

Even just valve's own games are wort billions, pretty sure with the marketplace and skins csgo is raking in a billion a year easily. And the cut from every markedplace transaction means that in theory valve could have made more of a single item in circulation than the item is actually being sold and bought for over time

[@logandoeslife]

I just wanted to say that I'm trying to live in Linux again, and because of valve I can play a ton of my games natively. I'm super thankful that they've put so much effort into proton

[@vibaj16]

Would you have any idea why Scrap Mechanic (a Steam game not native to Linux) doesn't recognize my integrated graphics on my Chromebook? I used the Linux development environment thing on Chromebooks to be able to do Linux stuff, and got Steam to work. Then I tried to use Proton to play Scrap Mechanic, but despite updating my Chromebook and verifying the integrity of the game files, it gives an error that says "Cannot create graphics device". Well, after updating my Chromebook, it no longer gives that error. Instead, it just does nothing at all when I click play. I also tried several different versions of Proton. My Chromebook (a Lenovo IP Flex 5 Chromebook) should be able to run the game. Maybe not very well, but it should be able to run at all. Minecraft can run relatively well (besides the baffling bug where highlighting text makes the screen freeze and start flashing while the game is invisibly still running perfectly fine).

[@logandoeslife]

@vibaj16 it could be simply the fact that it's on a chromebook. Some graphics libraries aren't compatible with arm processors. Or if you're using the Linux shell inside of chromeos, there are lots of limitations. If you're not currently dual booting, I'd suggest trying that. Just do some research beforehand on your specific laptop's compatibility with steam and 3d apps. It could save you a few hours 😂

[@ButterStubs]

The amount of TF2 sfm short films on KZbin is proof enough a valve movie would FRIGGIN succeed.

[@ivoryowl]

I'm usually not a big fan of mega corporations but Valve is one of the few I'm ok with. I'm impressed they have remained somewhat fair despite owning a monopoly. There are many actors that would have abused their position, had they been on Valve's shoes. I'm may be biased because I buy and play games on their platform but at least I don't hear Valve being involved in massive controversies and drama like so many others nowadays... I don't know. Just feels nice having something positive to say about a big brand for once.

[@vibaj16]

Exactly. It's why their "comeback" in the last few years has been so amazing

[@DAG_42]

As a dev and publisher on Steam I get to see behind the scenes and it's clear how they develop and run their business. It's lean AF, and I mean that as good and bad. Many would scratch their heads wondering why the dev and publisher interface doesn't "look good" or has pretty much not been updated in 10 years... the answer is those things cost money and it's not broken, so don't spin your wheels just to pat yourself on the back. Most companies can't help it... they change everything, constantly, seemingly for no other reason than to be busy

[@honeybear11gaming93]

Last evaluation of Valve was $10B. Don't think Apple wants to lay out that kind of cash right now. Not to mention as a privately held company, why would Valve want to sell with the way they are printing cash?

[@theftking]

It's one of those weird situations where the people who own Valve are already so rich, they'll never be able to spend all that money. Going public is just a bunch of headaches, and for what? More money? They already have enough for lifetime after lifetime.

[@xxxod]

@@theftking A working class person could retire on a small splinter of that wealth. Capitalism is crazy.

[@mum-your]

bro 10B is so low its actually insane. Like it would be 10B in 2012 but not today. GabeN alone is worth a few billions, how tf is the company only 10B then

[@Mystrei]

@@theftkingsurprised to see you here.

[@yanceyboyz]

You believe epic games is worth 4x valve......steam has had a monopoly since 2004 at 30% for every transaction on steam....

[@JelaniWood]

That "only 10k ppl can work at Valve" thing is true. I know 3 people that work there and u have to be good at at least 3 things that would be your full time job elsewhere. "Who uses Source?" APEX and Titanfall "and then Valve games" like DOTA2 and CS (two of the biggest games on the planet). There's also TF2, Portal 1 and 2, L4D 1 and 2, etc. All Top sellers of all time and ppl are STILL buying those games in 2023.

[@vibaj16]

Well, DOTA 2 doesn't use Source. It uses Source 2. Same for CS2, which is technically an update to CSGO.

[@sunbleachedangel]

I hate investment and all speculative shit in general, but if there was ever a company I would feel totally safe investing into, it would be Valve

[@apollolux]

Speaking of Valve and mobile, Bridge Constructor: Portal was pretty good. Yes, I know it was mainly Valve licensing Portal to the Bridge Constructor team, but it worked very well nonetheless. :)

[@Cosmstack]

Even if some companies will have the money to buy Valve, I really, really hope Valve will not let themselves be bought out. It would suck really really bad

[@vibaj16]

As long as Gabe lives, they won't be bought out.

[@raptorjesus3894]

I think the biggest thing to remember, is that Valve isn't just a money printer, because there are other big money printers, it's a money printer that doesn't involve any risk whatsoever. You don't worry about the next product launch, the new project costing too much etc, there will always be a demand for digital games, and they're significantly ahead of their competitors, where they have the gold standard product with all the features the competitors are trying to include. The closest a competitor has come is Microsoft with their subscription service, but even then, the library of it, vs the library of steam is like trying to compare a small puddle to an ocean.

[@CrystalFier]

"Who uses Source?" Every furry artist ever: 😒 Fr, every 3d artist, every youtube fnaf channel, half of every pr0n site, uses SFM.

[@legendboyAni]

Well they don't give money to valve like unreal makes for epic, but yeah valve is still big af

[@electro___]

"Is goldsource even out yet?" "Who even uses source?" These guys have no idea

[@andiq1]

At the moment valve kinda has facepunch developing a proper game development suite for source 2 in the form of s&box. Its currently in closed beta with a few thousand people having access to develop games on it and test them.

[@Xyler94]

After the Unity debacle, I hope Valve swoops in and delivers a great 3D engine in competition to Unreal. Unity shot themselves in the foot with a Gustav at this point...

[@andiq1]

@@Xyler94 facepunch is heavily modifying the engine and remaking most of it in c#

[@stokbrood]

​@@andiq1no? They first built their own engine, but then Valve gave them access to Source 2. Both are working closely together to see how they can improve the engine, but it's not a modified one

[@andiq1]

@@stokbrood I dont know where you get your info from but they are currently redoing the whole entity system as an example.

[@tuhaggis]

Shareholders would squeeze everything great out of Valve. The greatest things going for them is their willingness and ability to play the long game, and that they've always maintained the position of offering a more convenient solution than pirating can provide to users, and removed virtually all barriers of entry for developers to use the steam platform to sell games. Now they're investing heavily into their own hardware and OS solutions and perhaps, in a twist of irony, it might be a multi-billion dollar corporation who makes Linux a viable alternative to Windows in the mass desktop market.

[@boycefenn]

I would cry of valve went public! fastest way for a company to loose their integrity.

[@minikame2272]

That isn't the *only* way a company's value might be determined. If you have a company with a sustainable business model and a stable nett annual profit, then it's pretty trivial to figure out what a sensible price ceiling for an aquisition might be based on the expected return over a period of time.

[@commanderoof4578]

Even 10,000% of apples cash aint anywhere near enough to buy steam or even a small part of it I mean look at most games sold in PC lets say 10 games sell for £50 each and each sells just 1.25m at 30% thats suddenly 180m or somewhere around there and thats just from 10 games at a moderate price selling decently Steam simply cannot be sold unless the global governments step in and force a 10% maximum platform tax which would see steam make way less money but still tens of billions a year

[@niemandzuhause4897]

Valve owns Counterstrike which is already a money printer of its own as well as Dota. On top they have two of the most influential and critically acclaimed IPs in all of gaming with Half-Life and Portal. These IPs are worth more then all of Blizzard. And thats not even counting the fucking 30% of every sale on their platform which has an almost monopoly on PC video games. Not just the insane money they have to make right now but also the potential money they could make with their IPs is ridiculous.

[@pacoroto]

Valve is not a monopoly, it's just a Market leader, you got GOG and Epic to choose from, that instantly denies the monopoly argument.

[@yanceyboyz]

Which they even let rum on their hardware in the steam deck

[@usshunk32]

My easier guess is, take how many games steam sells in a year and count from them. I found a web claim steam sells 439 million copies of game in 2021. Multiply that by US$30(let's just say every game cost $30), and take 30% from that number and it would be around US$4 billion of profit in a year. This exclude the money they made from steam market.

[@amentia]

Valve is the only likeable monopoly I can think of 😂

[@Marco-929]

3:00 Employee amount can be easily found in the anual financial statement record each year.. Private companies has to publish their financial statements aswell...

[@evilumski2]

5% of 62B is 750M xD I died

[@marv2507]

We all make mistakes sometimes, so what, 3.1B is still a ridiculous guess...

[@evilumski2]

@@marv2507 i agree, it was all laugh :)

[@mum-your]

CSGO net income 2022? 500M. and what did valvesell for? 750M

[@jouniosmala9921]

10B in steam revenue. 30% of that is around 3B$. Valve could easily make over 2B in profit so something like multiple of 10 would make it 20B$ . But more realistically using multiple of 30 would make it 60B$ company. And there are plenty of companies that have higher multipliers for their valuation. So 20B$ is floor, and I wouldn't put it past for Gabe to say no to offering of Entire Apple's cash reserves.

[@vibaj16]

Gabe has outright stated that he'd rather Valve disintegrate than be bought out.

[@lordyhgm9266]

The dev logs from Half Life- Alyx the conception that valve had become ‘rusted’ by the money was alleviated. There’s been many dead ends in games since they’ve not had as many major focusses.. hence Alyx and source 2, projects to get Valve in production again

[@davidbronke5484]

4:06 "Is GoldSrc even out yet?" 🤣 It must be 1998 again.

[@trueStatic]

Did Linus just do some sorta bad math 0:46? 5% of 62.48Bln is closer to 3.1 billion, not 700 million. That still might not be close to its valuation but it's funny that he lowballed the suggested figure by more than half an order of magnitude himself. Guess it doesn't matter when it's all made up numbers to begin with.

[@jamesphillips2285]

If he dropped a successive approximation on the floor: I would have expected him to start at 1% being equal to $625 Million.

[@ADreamingTraveler]

Linus saying how he would invest in Valve if he could is oblivious to the fact that the reason Valve is as good and successful and loved as they are is because they're a private company that is not beholden to investors and stockholders. They aren't forcing themselves to try and beat quarterly and yearly profits year over year even if it hurts their consumers. He really doesn't get it. Another thing about people not knowing how much Valve is potentially worth. Considering Activision Blizzard was bought for $70 billion I'd say Valve is at least two or three times more expensive than that possibly even more.

[@semi.]

There is a difference between value and price, and we should all know that all value originates from the work done by employees.

[@vibaj16]

Value: around $82 billion Price: N/A (priceless)

[@DinoCarrot]

valve makes almost $100M per month just from csgo cases ALONE now imagine the entire steam store, valves own games, etc...

[@yanlucasdf]

Like I said once, if the golden goose from jonh and the magic beans fucked the money tree, the child would be called steam Valve owns is a massive games shop that, as a side gig, makes games, game's engine and hardware

[@m4rt_]

Also, Valve is currently working on a new puzzle game. We don't know what it is, but people are speculating it's a new Portal. (since no other Valve game is a puzzle game at it's core, though they could be making a new franchise)

[@vibaj16]

Source?

[@m4rt_]

@@vibaj16 a job posting from valve, you should be able to find info about it by searching on KZbin.

[@yvangenesse1649]

LOL maybe they should look to buy UNITY with that money :}

[@gloryholdofficial]

Valve is easily worth 60 plus billion dollars no doubt they run like a well oiled machine with minimal staff because the staff only focus on what they are passionate about making them far more productive and if no one is passionate about something they assume it’s not worth persuing and it gets canned it’s actually fucking genius

[@SnifferSock]

5:05 they dont fact check themselves when the answer is in the public domain. They certainly can't be trusted to be accurate when the answer is unknown.

[@Kisai_Yuki]

Guys, the Source 2 (not GoldSRC (that was still based on the Quake engine)) is used by DOTA2, Halflife Alyx, and CounterStrike 2. Also Valve's VR demo "The Lab", Steamdeck demo "Aperture Desk Job", and something based on DOTA called "Artifact". Overall 5 of 9 things listed in the developer SDK wiki are VR titles. There are presently no third party titles using Source 2. Left4Dead, Alien Swarm and Portal 2 all used a non-2013 version of the Source engine. It's kind of a shame that the Source(2) engine doesn't get move love, cause it was pretty damn impressive for it's time, even back in 2004. "The Stanley Parable" was released in 2011 as a HL2 mod, before being a stand alone game release in 2013, and it only got a "significant remake" in Unity in 2022. Do you know how many versions of Unity were released in that time frame? Unity started in 2005. Unity has had 11 major versions since. Games produced with Source look about as nice as games produced with Unreal, and better than games produced with Unity. Please Valve, just make a version of the Source 2 SDK that can be used stand-alone under more appealing license conditions than Unreal and Unity. (FYI the current SDK licensee is "you must release the game mod for free.") I know it's wishful thinking.

[@zsewqthewolf1194]

If they make there own smartphone they would make billions

[@theloniuspunk383]

a fresh OS so we can ditch microsoft would be glorious!

[@zsewqthewolf1194]

@@theloniuspunk383 they are working it, just taking a while to make APIs to make older and newer windows game work on there OS

[@roqeyt3566]

I'd unironically buy that, reception support by local carriers be damned

[@zsewqthewolf1194]

@@roqeyt3566 gaming phones was not a thing 10 years ago until razer come in and show what can be done and now we now have gaming smartphones that is better then the other guys now. so if I see them make one it would be truly top of its class given how steamdeck show they know how to make hardware when they put there mind to it and not did what the steambox did

[@adams9727]

Imagine a world where there were ads on Steam, or a subscription/gamepass model ? If valve ever went public that's what investors would pull for. Fuck that. Valve is King, never change Gabe .

[@Thumper68]

Look up their info at whatever county’s tax assessors office and you can find out about physical location values at least etc.

[@dejfcold]

They have Portal bridge constructor on Android. Not sure if it's Valve game or they just licensed it to the Headup dev, but it exists.

[@NoLoseJustLearn]

Acquisitions aren’t done in pure cash, they usually involve a large amount of equity swaps. The leadership with equity in steam would want new equity in Apple and Apple would want that as well so they have a vested interest in steam’s continued success. Plenty of other points made here about why they wouldn’t want it, but it doesn’t just involve “does Apple have enough cash”

[@Xyler94]

Microsoft is currently buying Activision with nearly 70b in cash. They aren't doing equity swaps. Microsoft just has that much money...

[@A1stardan]

​@@Xyler94we all know how cool all the studios that Microsoft bought have become right?

[@vibaj16]

@@Xyler94 Microsoft could (well, assuming that they somehow would have this much money) offer a trillion dollars and Valve would decline

[@Pikminiman]

My estimate for Valve's valuation: Xbox's big leak shows us Valve's yearly revenue is around $6.1 billion. Yes, Steam prints money, but these days they also pay a lot of Linux coding contractors and hardware suppliers/manufacturers. In the past, I would've guessed higher, but these days I'm guessing around 45% profit, so around $2.75 billion in profit per year. For a company with such unassailable moats as Valve, including remarkable userbase loyalty and huge hardware growth prospects, I suggest a multiple of 30 is warranted. That puts my valuation estimate of Valve Corporation around $82 billion, as of 2023.

[@yanceyboyz]

See the problem is.... Microsoft don't know how much valve is worth, so the leak is already a terrible place to start.

[@Chexmaster]

It's because in gaben we trust

[@catswork]

it isn't just games. they take a portion of all sales on the community market too. they don't make money only from people buying keys. they then take a portion of people selling the unboxed item too. insane money glitch

[@StephenYuan]

I would guess that Valve pulls down 5-8 billion a year in profit, possibly more. Considering how steady and predictable their revenue stream is, that calls for a high valuation. A PE of 5 (pretty conservative) would yield a market valuation of between 25 to 40 billion.

[@RCXDerp]

They'd probably have a much higher P/E. I'd say 30+ is probably more fair. Still probably on the low side.

[@Astrotamtv]

Ain’t no way valve is estimated at 8 billion and epic at 32 wtf