There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users.
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.
I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.
They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
It's probably the most ridiculous nitpick in the history of ever, but I really hate the "sign in" button at the top right of Zed, particularly there's no way to hide it even through some configuration file. It's distracting to me and I want zero cloud connectivity associated with my text editor.
The Material redesign makes a lot more sense now. I still think it's a terrible decision and a huge waste of resources though.
Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.
I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".
I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
I agree that private companies can be good and I use Steam a lot, but Valve sucks in other ways. Their community is awful and developers can have posts openly calling for their death or calling them racial slurs and Valve support will tell them they won't remove the posts. I don't mean they deny the support request, I mean a person will respond and say "Yeah manage your community better." This is despite the fact they give no tools for community management.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.
I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
my point is that valve/steam takes 30% "because they can". they could charge 5% and im sure still make tons of money. it's still a cut throat business, and while yeah they could be doing shittier things to make more money, i think they also do risk assessments on disturbing the golden goose
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.