Hajotay

I’m making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can’t prove one way or another. All I can really say is

• Valve’s website doesn’t average any position related to PR, marketing or community relations
• I’ve never seen a marketing position advertised on glassdoor for Valve
• Valve’s public-facing communication is legendarily poor, almost entirely buried in patch notes

So I’m just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.

Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient.

“Their marketing arm?” So… Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she’s really ruthless…

Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there’s a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.

Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they’re supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy.

jfc lmao does this “ninja army” sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn’t even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.

But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is… a lot.

So give me some proof of Valve’s “ruthless” marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve’s “image handling” is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?

We already know a little how Valve works (here’s an old employee manual). Note the line “There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants.” So yes, even Valve’s marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it’s a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how “Valve” (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.

This image you are painting of Valve is just… funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.

Well I’m not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I’m going to hate them it’s because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There’s nothing stopping them from

• buying up exclusivity contracts

• making a DRM that actually functions

• developing only proprietary software

• making their games pay-to-win

I don’t know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).

Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the “good guys” of gaming

How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don’t do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it’s radio silence for the rest of the year.

I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that’s that’s the worst you’ve got then Valve is must be amazing.