The new and rearchitected Steam client (currently in public beta) is an improvement over the old client for me. It feels like a pretty good evolution, bringing performance and new features.

It's pretty clear they have spent a lot of time and effort on this release, without enshittifying it.

I haven't heard of the new client, I'll happily eat my words if they manage to fix any of the things that I've been grousing about for years.

You'll be disappointed, it's not an entirely new client but rather a hybrid. Some pages are in a new design, some in the old, it's a huge mish mash in the same way Windows is.

The updated Big Picture mode is great. I'm able to do practically all my Steam-related interactions with just a controller, without needing to get my keyboard/mouse.

Interesting... I've never heard that about Valve being a dysfunctional company. They have the higher revenue per employee than Google or Microsoft. Staff seem highly motivated and self directed, and - with the notable exception of the Tilt 5 conflict over the future being VR vs AR (which was settled incredibly amicably) - they seem notably free of internal dysfunction. For a company in the games industry in particular, they seems astonishingly well run.

Valve's dysfunction doesn't manifest as drama (which is how dysfunction manifests in other gaming companies, e.g. Activision-Blizzard), but rather as interminable deadlock. Fortunately for Valve, they reaped the first-mover advantage with Steam (and literally invented loot crates, a decade before Fortnite) and can freely sit on their laurels while Steam prints an infinite pile of money.

That may be but they're sitting on their laurels more productively, in terms of revenue and profit per employee, then either Microsoft or Google or Meta.

Valve Index, Steamdeck, continual dominance of PC gaming both in long tale and new releases. I see enormous creative and financial success, and apparently an engaging and productive place to work. What deadlock? Game releases? That hasn't been their focus for a long time - yet when they do release a new game, like Halflife Alex, its usually critically lauded and commercially successful. Meanwhile much of the PC gaming space is suffering from enormous problems - early broken releases, bad ports, stutter struggle etc. Valve seem like a rare bright light of ethical business and technological innovation.

Valve is famously dysfunctional in some ways, as they don't really have "drivers" pushing things if the employees don't really want to do it.

Yeah - that sounds ideal honestly. And I think their success bears it out. A company driven by the passions and creativity of some of the most talented programmers and artists in the industry. They gate for self motivated people through their hiring process, and it works well for them. The idea that organisational structures should be authoritarian in order to be productive is fundamentally flawed IMHO, and Valve (as well as companies like SEMCO, and educational organisations like Sudbury Valley) ably bear that out.

All large organizations are fundamentally pathological, and even smaller ones will have their own querks and disfunctions.

Valve has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of flak, over its flat structure and "drivers", but I'm not sure that's particularly worse than some of the atrociously broken engineering practices I've seen at F500 companies.

I sort of wonder if they are even a game company anymore.

I mean we could model them as a totally dysfunctional game company they happens to have a platform. Or as a basically prudent platform company that happens to release a game once a decade or so.

They should get rid of their web browser, that’s the sort of market where they can’t keep up.