zlacker

>>thecal+(OP)
The reasulting reality of the managerless approach hasn’t been good. As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”.

I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”

Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!

>>gumby+54
For anyone who seeks to emulate Valves internal structure you have to ask yourself one question - do you already have a core product with a near-unimpeachable monopoly which consistently brings in enough money to keep the entire company afloat, with enough left over to bankroll moonshot R&D projects on top? If not, you can't afford to operate like Valve. They cancel 10 projects for every one they ship, if not for Steam bringing in endless billions of dollars they would have gone out of business a decade ago.

>>jshear+25
Steam isn't an unimpeachable monopoly, their competition is just so much worse.

>>ric2b+x6
I disagree, many of the competitors do what is necessary just fine.

There is a strong sentiment with many gamers of just not wanting to use an alternative and it is basically a non starter for many other stores. Many complain about the very idea of not all of their games being in the same place.

This isn't necessarily anything monopolistic done on Valve's side. But it would be very hard for another store to make any meaningful impact regardless of how they are.

>>nerdjo+O9
Many of these alternatives failed because they were forced onto users who had already paid over $60 for a game, and they were incredibly slow and clunky. They might have improved over time, but people still remember how bad these stores were at launch.

>>daemoe+8c
Isn’t that exactly what Steam did with the Orange Box? They just did it in the 2000s, years before anyone else.

>>throwu+7e
They could get away with it because there was no competitor like Steam.

>>daemoe+we
Yes, that's the effect a monopoly has on the market.

>>j_maff+ng
Not really. When Steam was the only digital distribution marketplace in existence, it didn't have to be better than any other digital distribution marketplace to convince users to switch to it, by virtue of being first. The followers who look at Steam's profits and want to capture that for themselves have to do so. It just happens that it seems every marketplace since has attempted to compete for developers (particularly in the vein of trying to achieve exclusive games) and generally ignored competition for users except as a byproduct of developer competition.

And the result is that users overwhelmingly prefer to use Steam, with alternatives largely relegated to at best grudging acceptance for those games that require alternative launchers. Since companies are reluctant to post numbers, it's hard to tell what the exact situation other than "Steam is well over 50% of the market", but the next largest is probably GoG, especially if you exclude self-publishing from statistics (if you include it, the popularity of Fortnite might push Epic Game Store into second place). And note that GoG is pretty much the only store that offers users a specific value proposition to use them over Steam: GoG is DRM-free (better publisher/distributor split is a value proposition for developers, not users).