this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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it's amazing to me how valve employees & gaben haven't become out of touch with their customers (i.e. ordinary people), despite how rich they must have gotten. it's documented phenomenon in psychology that the richer and more powerful you got, the less capacity you will have for sympathy. basically, as a company gets big and rich, they stop being able to understand what will piss their users off (think "dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?").
this hasn't seemed to have happened with valve yet, somehow. they still seem to be down to earth people. (btw, if you haven't watched any of the steam sales promotion videos, they are pretty fun, take a look).
Not a public company, makes big difference
Not surprising when I think about all the different ways the extremely wealthy have corrupted all of our democratic and regulatory institutions, but it's pretty ironic that only privately held companies can respond to public feedback in a healthy way these days
Hyper-Capitalism? Nooo.
//RETRO//-Captialism? ... significantly better by comparison.
Terrifying, but true.
'Stakeholder Capitalism' turned out to be approximately the same degree of bullshit as 'Abundance Agenda' is now.
I think it's because it's filled with competent people who genuinely like what they do. I definitely see that in their hardware division at least. Money isn't so corrupting if it's a tool to enable what you do and not the focus.
The entire company is somewhere between 300-500 people.
It literally fits into a few floors of a tower in Bellevue.
Meanwhile... Microsoft essentially bought the land area of a mid sized US city, and turned it into a sprawling corporate complex.
... and that is just their main campus.
Microsoft literally runs a private shuttlebus system in the Seattle-Bellevue-Issaquah area, to get people into and out of their campuses.
They then also have local private taxi services to get people from one building in a larger campus, to another.
There's your scale difference.
Microsoft is essentially a semi-sovereign entity, occupies substantial territoty, got their own police too.
... Valve has something like 5-10 concurrent floors in a single building that is basically on top of a shopping mall.
I imagine because their work environment is laid back, it's easier to just enjoy it and not worry about squeezing everything out of it.