Has Valve done anything noteworthy in the last 10 years besides milking the Steam store? Their half-baked console seemed like an attempt to do more of the former.

I know you are trying to be snarky but Valve has accomplished a hell of a lot more than most startups ever will. They are far from perfect (hell, they’re known for bugs and their famously poor timelines, and I heard their game Artifact was not good,) but it’s pretty bizarre to suggest they do nothing. Maintaining Steam alone is huge. It’s hard to find a platform with more vigorous fanboys for good reason.

But that all aside... I mean they have a new Half Life game on the near term horizon (later this month apparently) and they have done a ton of work on VR and Linux support.

Fascinating article by Zvi (a very accomplished Magic: the Gathering player) about Artifact. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/artifact-what-went-w...

Summary: the game was brilliant ("uniquely amazing") if you were really good at it but was essentially impossible to get into, and its economy was badly constructed.

Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199134 a few months ago.

Steam has a run rate in the billions! Maintaining something that strong that was built before the last decade is a significant innovation?

Most Startups are at least trying to change the status quo.

Yes, it is. Keeping Steam growing and well-liked is an achievement in itself. They never really stood still with it.

Steam certainly challenged the status quo when it was released, and several times in its life.

Hell, who else is working on Linux gaming right now? They were relatively early on game streaming, VR. Steam Workshop? How cool is it that a large amount of one of their flagship games, Team Fortress 2, not only integrated a lot of third party content, but also paid creators back? How cool is it that many games like Counter Strike began as Half Life mods?

I don’t really use Steam much anymore, so it’s not that I’m personally attached much, but I will admit to being pretty impressed.

Is this sarcasm? Steam has been the only consistent video game Cloud SAAS in the past 10 years.Can you name one time that the service was down without warning/proper recourse, had a data breach, exceeded SLAs, etc?

Also, valve's ther ventures are....massively successful. The microtransaction model in gaming originated with Valve, and now the entire mobile and freemium gaming markets use that business model.

So in this case...I would say yes, everything valve has done as a company trying to make money in the last 10 years is par for other successful SAAS platforms.

> team has been the only consistent video game Cloud SAAS in the past 10 years.

Xbox Live.

The title of this thread is "Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions", and this comment thread delved into cloud SAAS providers with a flat org structure.

Steam/valve was brought up because they have a successful cloud SASS model with no subscriptions oand a flat org structure.

Xbox live has a subscription fee since day 1, is maintained by MS (the definition of "non-flat organizational structure"), and is vendor locked. Not even remotely comparable.

Vulkan