Valve

From Encyclopedia Dramatica
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Thou shalt have no other gods before me!
Thou shalt have no other gods before me!
Valve Corporation
Founded 1996
Founder(s) Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington
Website www.valvesoftware.com

Valve Corporation (commonly refereed to as Valve) is an American aggregation of life-sucking parasites brought together under the appearance of a company, a popular video game developer, known for their lack of morals and inexhaustible apathy towards their own community. The company's CEO is an infamous gluttonous abomination who hates the games his own corporation promotes. His infamy rose from a constant habit of deceiving and disappointing the company's fanbase by vowing false promises while at the same time mocking them nonchalantly, using his nonsensical two-bit prestige as an excuse for late releases. The only reason the company survived the last decade is because of their digital dictatorship system, Steam

Their most famous releases are stolen mods developed for other games, since embezzling fruitful concepts on a bullshit pretense is easier than making a game from scratch. Valve's long-standing strategy has been to find and convince the mod's original creator(s) to sell their soul, work, and talent for false promises and esteem. Since the main goal of the company was always to make money and worship its CEO, the ghoulish husks that worked at Valve turned their attention to the gullible mind-controlled fans, who were always sitting ducks, ripe for harvest and constantly at their disposal. Their followers will gladly accept any discomfort from Valve as long as they believe the company cares about them. At one point, the company discovered the free-to-play deception model used by Jews in MMORPG games. Other than eating his own development team, the only thing Gabe Newell ever did was play those festering feces. The games that got sucked into the make-believe free-to-play agenda were ultimately turned into a source of steady income, since nerds love buying pixels to decorate their alter-egos. 

   
 
At this rate I'm starting to think Valve is actually just fucking with us.
 

 
 

—Valve fanboy finally realizing the obvious.

Valve's totalitarian regime

Valve is watching!

File:Steamsales.gif

   
 
Everyone knows Valve is the good guy. No one in their right mind could call Valve evil.
 

 
 

—Yes, because when something needs to say it's not evil, it's definitely not evil.

Over the years, Valve Corporation managed to engulf itself in a thick layer of hazy ambiguity in order to mask its wrongdoings and numerous economic and social exploitations of its customer base, taking baby-steps in order to hide their schemes from the perception of an ordinary person.

Over-analyzing their company policies, marketing strategies, secretive sales figures, regional price inequality, apathetic and limited customer support, digital dictatorship platform, digital rights management, zombified customer base, soulless personnel, or their tyrant of a ruler, you can quickly notice a repeatable pattern that pops up in your head every time you reevaluate the research. Valve is, by all means, the epitome of greed, deceit, and evil. Their schemes managed to brainwash and control their target audience over the years without opposition and successfully built an enduring, indelible tumor. Just like a parasite finding a new host, the gullible simpletons that swallowed their lies got sucked into their corporate machine. Valve, like a plague, consumes the feeble-minded with swiftness and ease, something that would make even the most accomplished Jews shiver in fear.

In this day and age, you could compare it to a religion, since in the modern age, the next logical step in the creation of a cult is this one. What do Valve and religion have in common? A centralized seat of power, leader(s), mindless drones following and worshiping it, a steady income based on the aforementioned mindless drones, influence in the real world, influence in history, apologists that blindly defend it, fanatic preachers, unwarranted media praise, total control and power over their followers, it's based on lies, deceit and secrecy etc.

Some argue, that Valve isn't evil because its behaving like an efficient corporation. With that logic, Nazism wasn't evil because it was behaving like an efficient ideology. Over the years, Valve has managed to slowly build a monopoly over the digital distribution of video games and maybe, in the future, even software. Using processes like Greenlight and Early Access, they are not only controlling indie game developers but also unfinished games. With these two systems, Valve is no longer required to vouch for the quality of products; they just lay back and collect the market share while ignoring everything else. Also, indie developers are now forced to either accept Steam as their lord and savior or risk swimming against the current. In other words, Valve has the power to remove, reject, and blacklist your services if you dare to oppose them in any shape or form. In some cases, they will do so just because they feel like it, making it nearly impossible to make a living without Steam. They also force you to sign a non-disclosure agreement in case you want to spill the beans on their sales figures. It's not only indie game developers that want to escape the clutches of Steam; triple A game developers and publishers like Ubisoft and EA tried to build and popularize their own digital distribution platforms, refusing to list their upcoming releases on Steam. In the end, all of their releases later appeared on the platform, proving yet again that all roads lead to Steam. 

Valve controls even the products you already own. By their own policy, you are not buying their products, you're renting them. You would think that by paying for a product, you should legally own it. Well, guess what? Though luck. You don't own it and you can't share it. Besides, Steam is, at its core, a game registration system—a system to verify if you bought a legitimate copy of a product. This is without disregarding forced automatic updates that would be handled through the developers' website, where you could decide when to download and install a patch. Even after the registration of the product has been concluded, the Steam client must always be running in order to use your product, even if it doesn't require an internet connection. This system forces people to completely rely on Steam. There's also regional price inequality, where products cost more in Europe and Australia for no apparent reason. After people started buying products and gifting them to themselves or to each other, Valve decided to region-lock products, thus preventing people from different continents from exchanging products. So there's a system that controls your property, forces upon you unwanted things, and is always watching you. Ring any bells? If they can apply this kind of control over their users, what would stop them from creating new policies like a subscription-based model for their products? Also, what will happen to your products if the company goes bankrupt? What happens to your products if you or Valve have connection problems, a bug in the system, or the system gets hacked? Ah, that's right, an apology letter from its CEO

The company has the power to cancel your account or any other service at any time. If your account is cancelled for whatever reason, you will get no refunds for any of the purchased products. In the event that you disagree with their terms and conditions, your only line of defense is to promptly fuck off and lose all access to your products. Steam does not only run your products; it also has the power to regularly scan your machine's hardware and software. Then Valve sells this data, which apparently has market value, without paying you a cent. They do not say what data is being gathered, and you don't know what personal data of yours ends up on their servers.

Does anyone remember mods? The free licensed software that is for everyone? If someone makes the mistake of publishing their mods on Steam, on the Steam forums, cloud-service, or in-game communication platform, they lose all their rights to the mod and the software becomes property of Valve. In other words, Valve has the right to use, reproduce, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, transmit, broadcast, and otherwise communicate, and publicly display your mod without the obligation to pay or even mention that you're the original creator. Basically, stealing mods is something they have done from the start. The newly added feature to Steam allows modders to charge money, ask for donations, or continue making their mods free. This is without taking into consideration the future outrageous prices developers will ask for their creations; people trying to sell somebody else's content; mod piracy that wouldn't have existed otherwise; and the horrendous future copyright issues that will emerge from this new clusterfuck. Assuming that mod creators want to opt-out of this gimmick and remove their paid content from Steam, they will be surprised when Valve won't do that unless legally compelled to do so. In other words, mod creators can't dictate what happens with their own creations once their concept gets sucked into the corporate womb. The idea of a donation option is commendable, but monetizing something that was previously free, where more than half of the money will end up in Valve's pocket, is beyond greedy and malevolent, but who's surprised? 

Ultimately, you're willingly taking part in a system that controls and watches you, and if anything goes wrong, you have zero rights. Valve and Steam are disliked not because they profit from their original innovation; rather, they are disliked for their tyrannical methods of subduing software developers, consumers, and the market. In the end, the brainwashed imbeciles that worship the company will always find an excuse for Valve's tainted immorality that's infected with cupidity and egoism, concealed under the fabrication that the corporation is actually doing all these things for our benefit and for the greater good. Which only a complete moron would believe.

   
 
Valve is the cancer killing PC gaming, I never thought they would stoop this low, lower than EA and Ubisoft combined.
 

 
 

—Concerned citizen speaking the truth.

The above statements can be verified by reading the Steam subscriber agreement and the Valve privacy policy.

Into the bowels of the machine

Valve's management team.

Diving deep into the bowels of the corporate machine, we discover that Valve is running like any other big corporation, on the misery and horror of their employees, but on a completely different level. If you think their greed stops at their front doors, think again. In order to increase the productivity and interactions of their workers, Valve adopted an open-plan architectural design for their buildings in order to increase the productivity and interactions of their workers, but in reality, they just wanted to minimize the construction cost of individual offices. If it's not a completely open space, but a small crowded cabal room where people are crammed in together like sardines, the only difference here is that no one will try to gas them. Many psychological studies show that these areas do not only force their hirelings into a constant state of stress and discomfort, but ironically, they also greatly reduce their job performance and interpersonal collaboration. On the other hand, does Valve give a shit? Not really. Because of these factors, the employees that should work in a team actually develop secretive competitive hostility against one another in order to climb the stack rank ladders, so these collaborative relationships lose all of their fucking meaning.

Just like panopticon prisons, the main purpose of these office spaces is to easily control and scrutinize the poor suckers that happen to work there, who slowly lose their marbles and eventually develop paranoia. They deprive employees of basic needs such as privacy, calm, satisfaction, composure, motivation, and so on. Most of the time, workers are troubled by other distractions and are constantly interrupted and annoyed. They can't have private conversations, and most of the time, the cabal rooms are polluted with excessive blabber where everyone is trying to cover the other person. Their desks are squeezed in so tightly that you could confuse the rooms with furniture waste dumps. Workers are susceptible to bad lighting and irregular temperatures that they can't adjust. They are always exposed to one another, risking a high chance of animosity and diseases. Besides these and many other negative aspects of open office slave pens, employees are subject to the circle-jerking that is present in the lifeless management structure. This minority of overseers formed and led an inquisition against the commoners who were deemed unworthy to work at Valve; some were labeled as "trouble makers" for trying to make a difference, which is unacceptable at Valve. You don't want someone to spark a hint of hope in the hearts of your people. In truth, the reason for these persecutions is fear. They fear that their tight management circle may get contaminated with new blood, something that the soulless husks that work there loath with all their essence, or better yet, lack thereof.

   
 
After a while I realized Valve's "Cabal rooms" resembled panopticon prisons.
 

 
 

—Former Valve employee, Rich Geldreich


Valve's cabal rooms.

Source (game engine)

The Source engine in a nutshell.

Source is the third reason why Valve is a well-known pig den, besides Steam and Gabe Newell's quad chins. It debuted in 2004 alongside Counter-Strike Sauce and Half-Life 2. From that point in time, all future Valve releases were based on the engine. Over the years, Source was updated repeatedly without any significant improvements, besides a HDR support or certain game performances.


The Source engine, while incredibly overrated, always feels like the same mundane heap of manure, horribly sluggish and awful to control. The Source SDK, the software development kit compiled by Valve, is the buggiest development kit you could find. Besides the fact that it's always outdated and dilapidated, it's difficult to use, even by the standards of the most proficient of the neckbeards. The only exception is when an actual game development team sits at it for several years with millions of dollars as backup money. The engine is atrocious for modding, which ironically should have been its forte. Unlike the mods that spawned from Half-Life 1, a large percentage of the released Half-Life 2 mods are complete garbage. 

For example, the Source engine is very outdated, since, graphical speaking, a new game from Valve on "Ultra High" settings looks like Crysis on low settings. However, the only good thing about the engine is that very few game developers intend to use it.

   
 
Personally, speaking as someone who has worked on multiple Source SDK mods since 2005, I would stay as far away from Source as possible. It simply feels as if they do not care about their free tools anymore.
 

 
 

— Valve not caring about anything? Preposterous!





Games

But the gameplay needs to be more fair and balanced.
  • Half-Life and its addons - The game that started it all. Based on a mute autistic scientist that got his degree on the internet, who miserably fails in a secret research facility to press a button, and goes berserk with his trusty crowbar, murdering numerous aliens and human beings in a series of underground bunkers, before killing a huge alien space baby. Spawned a shit-ton of mods that all have died and vanished by now.
  • Half-Life 2 + Episode 1 & 2 - You wake up 20 years later, where another bunch of aliens have took over your planet. Now you have to kill everything again, but this time with crappy guns, while being forced to listen to scripted sequences, which will bore you to death.
  • Half-Life Alyx - VR prequel to Half-Life 2 that ends with a time paradox, because the new shitty writers couldn't think of any better way to divert from the leaked Half-Life 3 story ("Epistle 3").
  • Counter-Strike - The first popular Half-Life mod that was bought up by Valve, which gets revamped every now and then with a new sequel, because the kiddies just can't get enough of using wallhacks and aimbots. Cheaters are the number one income source of this game, srsly.
  • Day of Defeat - Another mod that was bought up by Valve. Unlike CS however, they first stripped everything good the mod had off it, then they proceeded to dumb it down, add horrible sound effects, horrible maps, horrible visuals, Britbongs and other useless things, like a bulldog mascot. People still played that downgrade anyway. Shortly after, Volvo decided that Day of Defeat should be used for HDR graphics-testing purposes. In a short amount of time they created DoD: Source, then forgot to patch several guns, maps, weapons and more content and left it to rot and die. In the end the Source version was nothing more than a "fancy" graphics demo.
  • Dota 2 - A remake of DotA, where everything is pretty. You start a game, get owned and told to kill yourself by your Russian teammates, while getting lynched by a moronic report system. It's League of Losers for the hardcore / tryhard crowd.
  • Left 4 Dead - Four player survival-horror zombie game starring Epic Beard Man, a hater, a 16-year old girl, and a nigger.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 - A sequel nobody asked for, that stars Uncle Phil, Nicholas Cage, an extremely ugly, unfunny negress and a redneck. Valve cares so little about this franchise that they let modders screw around with it and release patches.
  • Gunman Chronicles - Space cowboys n' stuff. A retail mod from the early 2000s that Valve gives absolutely no shit about and won't bring to Steam, ever.
  • Ricochet - "I'd rather have ass cancer than to start this up again" - the game. You throw discs at other players to behead them in a TRON-like arena. Extremely clunky with annoying sound effects, nobody ever liked playing this crap, not then, not now. There is no nostalgia, even Valve once teasered Ricochet 2 as an April Fools' joke, that's how much everyone hates it.
  • Portal - The game with the cake and the murderous AI. Praised by people who hate videogames.
  • Portal 2 - The sequel with the stupid, poshfag British ball that never shuts up and betrays you 1/4 through the game. Features a Co-Op mode that nobody plays, because solving puzzles with strangers is retarded.
  • Team Fortress Classic - The game nobody liked or played, because there were hundreds of better mods available. Was completely abandoned until TF2 was released, then quickly forgotten again. Has completely overpowered & nonsensical grenades that can clear entire rooms full of players, there is zero teamplay, because it's treated like Half-Life deathmatch with gimmicks.
  • Team Fortress 2 - A hat-simulator played by 12 year old faggots.
  • Alien Swarm - A combination of a 10 year-old tourneyfag game no one ever heard of, and Left 4 Dead - except you kill aliens.
  • Artifact - Also known as Artifuckd - A terrible card game that expected players to not only pay full price, but also pay for the cards too. Received scorn from players (and even Valve fanboys) the very first day it was revealed. Valve desperately tried to resurrect the game with a "refresh", which also failed at that and gave up mid-beta. That's why you now have two versions of the game, both Free 2 Play (with no reimbursement for the retards that actually bought it, lmao) and barely. Both games have a combined player count of barely 50 players, let that sink in.
  • DotA Underlords - An "Auto Chess" clone that nobody plays and therefore never gets updated. Valve wanted to jump on the newest bandwagon (that lasted maybe half a year, before everyone except Riot Games forgot about it) and failed miserably.

Progress on Half-Life 3

Meanwhile at Valve...
Pretty much.

See Also

  • Gabe Newell - The only person capable of holding that gigantic mess of a company together. Even Valve employees agree.
  • Steam - The only reason Valve hasn't gone bankrupt.
  • Steam Users' Forums - Where free speech is banned.
  • Source Filmmaker - A free animation tool that Valve made so their fanboys can make TF2 porn.
  • EA - The cancer of gaming. Literally.
  • Epic Games - Determined to be even more cancerous than EA.
  • Activision - The jews of gaming.
  • PC Gaming - It's dead, Jim.
  • Dota 2

Valve is part of a series on

Gaming

Visit the Gaming Portal for complete coverage.

Valve is part of a series on

[ToggleToggle]

"Masterpieces"

Counter-Strike (Franchise)DotADota 2Garry's ModHalf-LifeHalf-Life 2Left 4 Dead (Franchise)PortalSource FilmmakerTeam Fortress 2 (Major Updates)

"Community"

!!REMP OwnerAdam LanzaBob8466C-NOTEHermanKing GabenFacepunch StudiosHeavy The SquidRyan PalmeterSteam (Games - Forum - Furries) • Steam Friend Threadmyg0tMaxofs2dMcSkilletNuzzleFuzzleWilliam Atchison

Miscellaneous

Dr. HaxGentlemenFreeman's MindHunt Down The FreemanMic spammingNatural Selection (Mod)Nope.aviPC Master RaceThe Orion ProjectSchool Shooter: North American Tour 2012Skibidi Toilet