That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.
Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.
I wish the decent guys who started companies would leave a directive for the company that must be followed to prevent it from becoming just another shitty piece of garbage like everything else these days has become thanks to the geniuses with business degrees running the world.
But there’s no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.
The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.
The best way to do this would be to make the company Employee Owned
Even then though you could have employees voting to change the direction of the business. If someone offers to buy the business for billions, then it’s possible everyone would vote to accept the sale and change everything.
The business is always going to change over time.
Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn’t become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they’ll be fully responsible for it.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn’t use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.
What valve does is so distinct from what most of the industry does the comparison is laughable. Valve is still a company and not our friend sure, but they are not openly anti-consumer like EA or Blizzard. And they don’t abuse their monopolies like Google or Microsoft.
just because they started packaging wine with their app
Even if that’s all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve’s Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don’t they do that instead of whining?
Right? Its like someone leering at you.
Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.
You have no idea how this works.
Gabe Newell quit working for Microsoft before Windows 3.0 was released. Valve is an employee-owned private company, Gabe Newell ensured that even after his passing, Valve stays true to their roots as long as there’s the majority of employees sharing his ideals.
No, that’s not how it works. You have no idea how valves shares are spread out and neither does anyone else outside the company. Just because Valve employees own shares does not mean their votes are all equal, in fact they almost certainly aren’t.
Their text book is publicly available, so I disagree.
@LoafyLemon @boo @ono @DrVortex @rambaroo what book?
Employee owned businesses are something else, Valve is just a regular privately owned business, one that the owner works for and takes a salary from.
Employee owned businesses are owned by all of the employees, collectively, with a slightly more democratic decision making process. The CEO still makes the decisions, but employees have a right to have their input heard as shareholders. With Valve, Gabe has the final say on everything.
@TWeaK @LoafyLemon it’s not a co-op. Still, that would be an interesting business model in the gaming space. I think people would be down to support something really alternative. I’m tired of MS and apple and all these business that are still stuck in old school business mindset.
Co-ops are owned by a community, eg customers can be members. Employee owned businesses are just owned by the employees. It’s a relatively new thing, however where it’s being implemented in the UK it’s more of a tax fiddle - the business owner gets their business to buy itself from themselves, then the owner gets zero capital gains tax. If you sell a business for £25 million, you save on a £5 million tax bill. It’s great for people looking to get their investment out of a cash-rich business.
It’s still a pretty good idea, but I’m not holding my breath to see the range of companies adopting Employee Owned practice actually pass on all of the benefits to their employees.
Either way though I’m fine with Valve being a private business, at the bare minimum it retains the opportunity of being better than a publicly traded company. Also, it’s not like video games are some essential service that really belongs under social ownership.
@TWeaK I’m a little confused about the overall post and the UK position since we are talking about an American company but yes, alternative business models are needed. Thank you for contributing.
The UK example was more about their method of transitioning from private ownership to employee ownership, basically me going on a tangent to say that it isn’t always all great. However the nature of the different types of business ownership is consistent everywhere, more or less.
- Private ownership - the business works for the owner(s).
- Employee ownership - the business works for the employee shareholders.
- Co-op - the business works for the co-op member shareholders.
- Publicly traded - the business works for the public shareholders. Additionally, the CEO is bound to this by law (both in US and UK, and most other places I imagine), not just their employment contract, and in practice this means the CEO must pursue profits because that’s always what the vast majority of the stock market wants.
Valve is up there at private ownership, not employee ownership. Arguably employee or co-op ownership might be better, but I’m just happy it’s not public.
Like you say, a co-op business in the game space would be interesting. Something like a mutual insurance company, where the customers also own shares in the business.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
spoiler
All of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T
The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He’s already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?
Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well, the idea is you can do something else with the money instead of it being tied up with that company. You could start another venture if you want to. I’m pretty sure Valve is what he wants to be doing though, so starting a different company isn’t really something he’d want to do.
Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.
depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea
I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.
Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.
third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.
Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.
Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it’s own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.
However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn’t one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don’t really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is “it seems he isn’t about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible”. He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn’t.
Yeah where’s our antitrust enforcement?
The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.
The thought of another company buying Valve, especially one like Microsoft, makes me actually sick. I have spent so much fucking money on my Steam library at this point. If my Steam library gets jacked by some billionaire dickheads it’s all over, I’m never paying for anything again.
Yargghh?! Seriously though, I was furious when they bought Mojang and partially enshittified Minecraft.
I remember when they bought Rare, then squandered it. They pretty much solely did it to try and stop Nintendo making better games than them.
They bought Bethesda because they feared Starfield would become a (timed) PlayStation exclusive. They just bought the entire publisher… And now Activision is next.
Having said that I’m not a fan of Sony buying Bungie to use their “live service” expertise either.
Bungie’s been selling themselves out to one megacorporation after another for more than 20 years now. If Sony hadn’t bought them, someone else would’ve.
bad news my friend. Valve is owned by a billionaire dickhead.
Billionaire, yes. Dickhead? That’s subjective. I’m not gonna worship the man but his actions point to him being among the most pro-consumer of CEOs out there, so I wouldn’t say he’s a dickhead.
I’m not super informed on the man I guess, please enlighten me.
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This is so stupid. Of course they would buy it. Valve won’t sell, but let’s do the click baits!
They’d buy Sony and Nintendo if those were up to sell. For the right price (I dunno, in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank account), I’d buy them too.
in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank accoun
You decadent bourgeois pig
Look at Daddy Warbucks over here.
Yeah 100% this. Why would you not buy Valve? The store is a cash cow and the userbase is huge. They have a lot of good faith with the community too. These must be rage bait articles.
They can buy the Steam forums.
As long as Gabe lives, this won’t be a problem.
But he’s getting on in age so this will eventually be an issue, no doubt…
Gabe will have a good successor. Valve has a lot of talented and passionate employees that have been with the company since near the start.
This nothing email has been making headlines for a week and it’s so frustrating. It’s literally just a guy from outside the gaming division saying “what if” and Phil saying “sure, that’d be neat”
Gaben is one of the few people in tech I trust to resist the money MSFT would be willing to throw at something as successful as valve. I mean - they’re the closest thing to a trustworthy company as you can find these days.
Yeah, I doubt he cares about the money at this point, and he did leave MSFT, so I’m guessing he isn’t interested in selling. He also went out of his way to use Linux to stick it to MSFT.
As long as he runs the company, I don’t see it happening.
Even if he left the company he still has over 50% ownership.
Only if he decides to retain his stake. Let’s say he dies, perhaps his heir chooses to sell instead of stay involved in the company.
Eh, I would hardly call Valve trustworthy or the good guy
I would say don’t worship multi billion dollar companies.
Especially ones that only give you things you should have always had, like refunds, after being forced to by state lawsuits to force them into compliance with the law.
I miss the days when you actually owned your fucking games and could loan them to friends or sell them to get something else.
They aren’t the ‘good guy’ but they are one of the few tech companies left that try to make money by selling a product people want to buy. Basically everyone else is just trying to screw people over or sell out to investors as soon as they can.
That’s not good, but it’s the way people understand and think businesses should be run, even though most modern companies no longer work that way.
Valve is not worthy of your trust. Gabe won’t sell to MS because Valve is an absolute gold mine and it’s extremely unlikely even MS could make him an offer that actually makes more money for him in the long run.
I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years
I work for one who said the same thing then 2 years ago sold for $12 billion dollars to a public company. The employees didn’t get very much of that either.
A public traded company has way more transparency, I have no idea why you believe privately held companies would be in any way better.
The problem is often when the original founder of a private company leaves, the company loses its roots and by that its reason to exist. And those two often go together.
Only more transparency in the fiduciary sense, which only really helps shareholders. All companies are still required to follow any regulatory disclosures, which generally benefits the public and users.
Valve has only gotten to where they are being on the pulse of the gaming community, and being agile to adapt to those needs. Publicly traded companies only care about profits and shareholders by contract. That’s kind of their job once they go public. Very few buck that trend.
Yes you are somewhat right. But IMO Valve is what it is because of Gabe Newell, private or public is not the determining factor.
When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.
Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).
That the shareholders push for things in their interest over that of the company doesn’t exactly strike me as conspiratorial thinking. Nearly everyone in an organization will push for what’s best for them.
Maintaining a healthy organization is in nearly everyone’s best interest, but if you have a small group of decision makers who are not invested in the health of the organization, they’ll be willing to make decisions at the expense of the organization.
Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.
Microsoft as an example was absolutely controlled by the founders for decades, before they left the company and handed control over. There is NOTHING different about that, compared to a private company, that can also be traded.
My point was that Valve could only be what it is without being a publicly traded company. Yes, it also requires Gabe or the business owner to direct the company properly, but there are a range of things that publicly traded companies are legally prohibited from doing.
Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.
Control still primarily lies with the CEO, but the CEO of a publicly traded company is legally obligated to pursue profits above all else.
Control still primarily lies with the CEO
No control lies with the owners, a public company can easily have a single or a small group of owners that control the company. Your entire premise is simply false.
When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.
Depends how that happens. Since frankly I think people think “the way Gabe Newell leaves ownership of Valve is by him eventually dying”. Since he has never shown any indication to sell. He has offered shares to employees as part of compensation packages, but as I understand even then he has controlling share.
So ofcourse the most simplest way is “Gabe dies and has done no special arrangement”… shares go to inheritance to his family. So his wife and children. Which might mean nothing changes or everything changes. Maybe he has given private last wishes, maybe not. However they get to decide. They might decide to keep the company as is. Since given they are inheritors of Gabes fortune, not like they would be immediately hurting for cash.
Second option is… Gabe does actual official arrangements. This isn’t unheard of in case of big private family or personal companies or holdings. For example he might put his shares in a foundation or trust with legally binding last wishes unlike non legally binding personal last wishes. Then what happens is whatever the trust charter is. Given example of say some European industrialist foundadtions like Bosch, instructions are left to run the company as commercial business by board of managers to best benefit of the company finances. However the one option the holders don’t have is “sell the company”, since the shares are hold up in the foundation/trust with instructions “never sell”. Company is to be run profitable enterprise as his and best ability of managers and then… the trust gets the profits and uses them for it’s purposes. It might be a private family trust, where upon the money is then shared to Gabes descendants, but don’t really have say in “we want to cash out, just lump sell our shares”. It could also be as in case of Bosch, that it is charitable foundation. After which all of the business profits of the Bosch conglomerate end up financing various charities, foundations, clinics and so on run by the Bosch stifftung.
It will change no doubt, since well Gabe isn’t there anymore with his personal personality and well each person has their own personality and influence. However it might not change as much as people think, if say his heirs decide to keep running the company based on same base ethos and principles as Gabe did.
That or everything might change. Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.
Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.
As I’ve stated before, it’s 100% up to the owner, not what type of company it is.
Gaben used to work at Microsoft and left because he hated it.
Wow really? This may explain why valve likes Linux so much (at least in part, it’s an untapped market, 10 other reasons etc)
Fun fact, he left Microsoft before the release of Windows 3.deleted by creator
Also checked Wikipedia and it says “Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft as the producer of the first three releases of the Windows operating systems.” and he stayed at MS until found Valve which is indeed 1996. I guess that was some kind of a joke?
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I don’t think so. MS is more interested in moving customers to the cloud. So whatever gets more people to use the cloud.
getting rid of linux support may cause people to switch to windows, if not prevent people from switching to begin with…at least that’s how executives in ms would think
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Never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
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We need a president that carries a big stick, and uses it to beat the shit out of monopolies and billionaires.
What exactly could a president do? They aren’t kings despite what some would think.
They nominate positions on the FTC, which is supposed to be responsible for managing monopolies. Recent nominations have shown interest in updating or outdated policies regarding monopolies.
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Iirc the funding from MS to Apple was part of a deal they made with the authorities. Not because they wanted to.
What? Microsoft added Linux on top of Windows not long ago with the WSL. I severely doubt they’d discontinue proton or Linux and Mac support
They would discontinue it because Proton moves users to Linux(or more specifically outside of Windows) which they don’t want. WSL keep users on Windows.
Well, Proton is pretty important for the Steam Deck, and I doubt Microsoft would want to kneecap that device, at least while it’s still selling units.
Also Proton is open source, so while it can get less convenient to use, it can’t really go away.
Microsoft made WSL to get market share from web devs who were using Linux or Mac, so they could use a Linux shell for their development while using Windows as their main OS. I wouldn’t use WSL as evidence that they wouldn’t gut Proton support in Steam.
That being said, the Steam Deck is a very successful device that I doubt Microsoft would want to get rid of, and Proton is pretty vital for that, so they’d probably keep Proton going because of that. They might still seek to make the next revision of the Steam deck run a Windows based OS though.
Gabe has been a large proponent of avoiding the kind of consolidation that Microsoft is doing. He saw the writing on the way years ago when Valve released the Steam consoles. I don’t think (and certainly hope) that he wouldn’t sell.
Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.
The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft’s interests (and we have to thank them for that).
It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn’t.
Yea, but Gabe is not going to be around forever, and any successor leadership might have a different philosophy. And it’s never a bad idea to have a backup.
I hope to god he personally takes a someone he wants as his company successor under his wing and mentors them under his ways so that we may not worry as much. That’s if he doesn’t already have one or doesn’t have plans for it.
Yeah for a while now I’m been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.
@festus @headmetwall how do you make sure that when you load up a gog game that it does not launch the gog launcher? What are the steps?
The GOG launcher is optional (I don’t use it). On their website you can download offline installers for every game you own, and these installers don’t require the GOG launcher or any account authentication.
@festus where is this offline installer, exactly? Link? I just get hit with the gog new launcher option being advertised on the site.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148105-How-do-I-download-my-purchased-items-?product=gog has as the second option how to download the offline installers.
@festus nice. So what’s the point of the gog launcher app after this? Anyways, I prefer to use heroic. Much lighter and easier.
Honestly I’m not sure - as I said I don’t use it. I know of at least one game that’s “DRM-free” but requires the GOG launcher for multiplayer (No Man’s Sky). That’s fairly controversial and I think the only reason why it’s on GOG is because it came onto GOG back when it was a singleplayer only game.
Did everyone conveniently forget that Steam DRM is the reason why Steam came to prominence, and why it was ever used by any devs in the first place. Yes it’s easily cracked and barely an anti-piracy measure, even admitted by Valve, but it is still DRM.
@XenoStare @headmetwall that’s right. Steam is a business. They are not really for open source. Open source, is still a business model. It’s not public domain or libre software. Then can always make their stuff closed source at anytime. Just need to gather free work from the community and to elevate its private business. Still, there are articles detailing Valve as anti-consumer. It’s a search bar away.
I love Steam (have 2000 or so games on it) but I realize it is only a matter of time before it gets enshittified.
Maybe, but it’s still a private company.
Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.
Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.
I think valve will be okay as long as they have Gabe Newell, since it seems like he really does care about things like linux support. I’m worried what will happen if he ever leaves though
the man is 60 and morbidly obese. even if he never leaves there’s every chance he’ll have sudden health problems. at least he’d have the money for good medical treatment
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Well the thing is … yes Valve has shareholding investors… Only one that matter as far as anyone knows is Gabe Newell. Given it’s private corp, they don’t have to publicly tell what his exact ownership is and I think it is known it isn’t anymore 100% unlike at some point. However all “as far as we know” indications are, Gabe Newell maintains 50%+ controlling shareholding. Rest of the shareholders as people understand are employees and ex employees, who got private shares as part of compensation packages.
We don’t have actual look at the books, but Valve people have on multiple occasion said “Valve doesn’t have external investors”. Given it was public official comments by official people, I would think they wouldn’t lie about it. So there is no external VCs or share external investor investors.
Gabe pretty much has probably pretty universal control only limited by business regulation and maybe whatever clauses the corporate charter has. However since he was at one point sole owner, I doubt it contains anything too much curtailing him. Since the way any other people have gotten shares is by Gabe agreeing to give them or sell them to people in the first place.
As far as I understand at no point has Valve been cash strapped such as to need to ask for external investors. Since it is company founded by two early ex-Microsoft people who had made decently money at Microsoft already before Founding Valve. Gabe ended as sole owner as the other founding owner decided to leave the business and Gabe bought him out.
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That’s true, but Gabe still owns over half the stock, and I doubt he’s looking to sell.
Honestly I just assume Valve is Gabe’s hobby workdesk at this point.
I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs
Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!
This brings back nightmares from my first job!
no, especially not. After messing/locking down gaming for 2 decades and people having doing the job in porting/reverse engineer their API, etc… they will simply exploit it without any effort.
MSFT is evil, it does not “love” opensource (which is only TS and .NET), it just came with their massive war treasure and eat the effort of people while having been the MAIN responsible of slowing down innovation!
They pretend they love FOSS. “Look, we own GitHub, the biggest FOSS code sharing platform!”. Of course, because you bought it you morons.
For the love of God, please Valve never sell out. I love the current state of things and every day I dread someone might get a bad idea and fuck it all up for the rest of us to enrich himself.
I am not sure if there are any failsafes in the BoD at Valve, but I am sure as long as Gabe is at the helm, we are all safe.
only millennials and JS soyboy devs think that MSFT is good opensource boy, they didn’t grow up during while Ballmer/Gates were in charge and didn’t notice how nasty MSFT was for the computing and still is.
It’s impossible for me to understand not having enough. M$ is like some megacorp villain that wants to swallow everything
Always has been.
Thugs4less LOL
@Krzak @boo There used to be much more diversity in the marketplace, but those are bygone days.
Power, influence and greed are the prime movers these days and whowever is in a position to monopolize on this will have a caravan of equally minded people who will agree to participate in the slaughter of the free marketplace just for a piece of the action.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.
So long as Gabe doesn’t like die or have a personality changing stroke. Not sure what Valve’s plans are for his retirement
Selling to Microsoft would be a good retirement plan
According to Forbes, as of today, his net worth is apparently $4.3 billion. That man could quit now and live a very comfortable life until he dies.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish moment
Triple E gaming
