this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Because valve is a private company. They don't have to answer to shareholders. That means, they don't go through enshitifaction, they care about their product and their customers. Are they perfect? Absolutely not, are they good? Better than every single company out there that tries to be like them. Period.
I'm glad people bring this up.
Private companies are not intrinsically better than public ones, but at least they have the capacity to be.
Valve is one of the very few examples of a company that sees the value in working with customers, not against them. This would be impossible if Valve were publicly-traded.
Exactly. They're (as far as I know) the only company that emailed me to tell me that I can take to court directly without an arbitration. Not that I'll ever be able to afford it, but seeing how confident and pro-consumer (I fucking hate the word consumer lol) they are is amazing.
To be fair, that was in their own financial best interest. Since arbitrations are charged a fee per customer someone figured out that you can do an effective "class action" against valve by having many people submit the same arbitration claim against valve and costing them so much through the arbitration fees that it it was almost impossible for them to cone out on top regardless of the outcome of the arbitration (iirc).
They changed to allowing lawsuits because they can request those to be merged, and therefore its cost-effective for them to fight them.
It's not even that they'd have to pay for it; usually the filing party has to pay. Valve tried to be the good guys and while they did push for arbitration they said that they'd pay your arbitration fee for you, basically allowing you to file a legal complaint against them at their expense.
And then some fucking legal company figured out it's a neat loophole on how to bleed them through arbitration where the point isn't really the result but the costly process. Guess that'll teach Valve to try to be better than others. :|