this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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let's just say my yacht park is drastically larger than it was yesterday:)
Jokes aside, Valve did allow lots of talented people to find and express themselves, be it via steam greenlight or steam workshop. And Valve still are the pioneers on linux gaming among other corpos. Gaben surely isn't Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, but he certainly did some respect-worthy things, especially when you compare him to practically any other CEO.
Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said """hero""" has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn't have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew's shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
calling proton a "wine fork" is akin to calling a linux distro a "kernel fork". Proton does a lot of things that are simply out of scope for wine. Referring to it as yet another unnecessary standard is quite unfair, considering the impact it made.
First, I never called Valve, or Gaben in particular, heroes.
Second, Valve never "fucked over game ownership", because it was fucked over long before them. Lawmakers struggled with such concepts as "intellectual property" since the inception of the term. It's hard to sell something that can be infinitely copied, because the value of a good that is present in infinite abundance is zero. Licensing is an attempt to force IP behave same as material goods do.
Yeah, not only that, they invented battle passes too. Does that mean that without Valve there'd be no crates? I highly doubt that.
Also, unlike literally any other loot boxes in any other game, items for Valve games Always were primarily community-made. Each crate opened, each skin traded is a profit that is guaranteed to reach the original creator. The horse armor analogy is inadequate due to that, and the fact that oblivion is a single-player game.
Also, trading is still a thing, unlike in any other games. Back in the day i myself managed to get the cosmetics i liked without investing any money, purely by exchanging items with other players.
Now that's absurd. Both somehow accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident, and calling omnipreset in-game purchases "an economy". The only games with economy systems i can think of are those of Valve, EVE online, and some MMORPGs. You can't sell your Overwatch skins without selling the whole account, for instance. In other words, in most games, an in-game purchase is money forever lost.
You want to blame someone for the shit we're in right now? Blame mindless consumers that to this day mindlessly pre-order games based on how shiny they look in the trailer. Blame our modern culture for endorsing the anti-piracy agenda. Blame yourself for not lecturing your fellow neighbor why consumerism should be conscious. As long as people won't learn, there always will be bad actors exploiting all of the above. Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don't try to exploit their consumers, that make pro-consumer decisions not based off peer pressure, but rather because it makes the world a slightly better place.
I do. I judge people based off their actions. If the man managed to become a billionaire while making or supporting the development of some legendary games, developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good, using all of that power to instill pro-consumer policies; then by allowing artists to profit off something they made for the games they love; by providing a huge platform for indie devs; by supporting fan-made works based off Valve's IPs; by soloing the whole spectrum of problems regarding gaming on linux; by sponsoring and promoting FOSS... i'd rather let him keep the money, because my issue with most of the billionaires is not that they have more money than me, it's that they stripped off their humanity, ripping other people off to become billionaires in the first place. Gabe, on the other hand, doesn't fit the stereotype. If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp, because newsflash, reality isn't black and white, trying to treat it like it is — is the definition of bigotry.
Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I'd find you on the other side of the fence. Because that's what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn't really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.
It is a wine fork, and wouldn't exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.
Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can't be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of "subscriptions" as they call it. I'm sure you'll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.
And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything... We get to the territory of...
And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.
It doesn't matter. Point is they're the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don't care what "nicities" they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.
Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the "trading card" system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.
Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted "they're just that good" is nonsense.
Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.
Oh I'd be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.
I've played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You're so deep into believing the bull you're spewing, I don't think anyone will pull you out of it.
You don't become a billionaire by """offering good services""". The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don't even have a roof above them. End of.
Because obviously, modern corporate dehumanizing cash-grabbing culture is not a systemic issue present in any modern corporation, if Valve hasn't invented the monetization strategies, they wouldn't have appeared anywhere else, smh
I see that you're utterly unable to comprehend nuance, that, or you struggle with analogies. Let me bird-feed you what you just cited then:
Yes, proton, at the very basic level, is a wine fork. But, unlike wine, it does miriads of things that wine doesn't. Namely, it translates directx calls into vulkan ones. Proton was the first to integrate esync and fsync. Mind i tell you, that fsync support came to the vanilla wine only recently? On top of that, proton offers everything in a single bundled, working out of the box package, Unlike with wine, where you always had to tinker, install with winetricks or similar kind of bs. Just like it is with Linux kernel — "the actual hero", and "evil" distribution maintainers.
You won't read the whole paragraph? Yk, that tells about how intellectual property always was problematic, and all that stuff? Dunno, seems like an important context to understand what i'm trying to say...
Valve hasn't invented DRM in games, especially since we're talking about simple copy prevention by binding a game copy to a specific user account. CD keys and other copy-prevention methods existed long before that. Case in point, right about the time Half-Life 2 was released, little russian company known as Starforce technologies started to license their infamous DRM to studios such as Ubisoft and CodeMasters. Trust me when i say that it was marginally worse than what Valve did.
Mind you, what they did back there wasn't the most pro-consumer action on their behalf. It just wasn't as big of a deal as you think. Either you haven't read past the cited sentence, or your reading and nuance comprehension is so bad that you failed to see my point in the first place.
nah, you just failed to see my point.
Yes, once again, entirely optional, purely cosmetic diamond rings, original authors of which are other players, that receive returns from every purchase.
Yeah? What did they do to not only become a monopoly, but also stay one through all the years? It's not like something is actively preventing users from using any other store. Case in point, Itch.io is pretty popular amongst indie devs. At this point you're just spouting loud words.
Also, your reasoning couldn't be more lazy.
Uh huh, by forcing windows developers VisualStudio down their throats, having its own standard of c++, developing their own java to instill more control, then by buying Github and slopifying it. Tell me about it.
The only thing they actually do about FOSS is paying few developers to maintain the Linux kernel.
Except what you described is the world we're living in right now. For instance, someone like Bobby Kotick is reverd among corpos, and was compensated handsomely for his leave. Time to start getting anxious ig.
Sorry, didn't realize i was talking to a billionaire. You must be speaking from the mountains of experience you certainly have behind your back?
And i shouldn't have had keratoconus on both eyes by the ripe age of 22, hunger shouldn't exist, Santa should be real, and people should be smart and wise...
...enough to at least understand that life is full of crap and that some ideas never meant to be, regardless of how good they sound on paper... Yet here we are.
Sorry to disappoint, but billionaires exist, and they will remain existing unless we make something about that fact. Go on, make a career in politics and tax 'em all!
What i'm trying to say, unfortunately it's always easier said than done. Especially when it's something as shallow and trivial as "Wealth inequality is unjust and shouldn't exist".
I've been accused of simping for Gabe. Nd while it can certainly seem to be the case, especially when you're actively avoiding any sort of nuance in your judgement, I'm not a fan of his. He made bad decisions, the aforementioned HL2 launch situation is one of those. Another example would be the absolutely laughable launch and then shut down of Artifact. And i still don't understand who tf came up with the idea of CS2. Also, I won't ever get what's so thrilling about something as hedonistic as collecting the fucking yachts.
That said, when i compare Valve to other corpos, i can't but notice the positive influence. How many artists and modelers started out from submitting their works for tf2/dota2/cs:go? How many animators started from SFM? How many people became indie devs thanks to the existence of the Steam greenlight? How many people switched over to linux thanks to proton?
Now name me a single other corpo that had similar positive effects on so many people in so many aspects.
I'm simply placing credit where credit is due, plus, ngl, i kinda hate people like you — people with the clinical case of tribalism, always dividing people and their actions into binary categories, because doing that is always just that much more easy than turning on your brain for a good minute to study and analyze the reality around yourself. You're a prisoner of your utterly childish worldview, which you have not the slightest idea on how to implement into reality, yet you sure as hell is very loud about. "All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don't even have a roof above them."? Well, duh, congrats on grasping the basics of morality, genius. What a profound take, how didn't i come up with it myself?
While saying something like that makes you feel good by creating the illusion of the moral high ground, the "profound" words you spouted carry no substance. Tell me, do people like you ever have the slightest bit controversial thoughts, or are you 1:1 human equivalent of a highly-censored corporate llm?
Billionaires bad? Boo, get new better material!
Whatever. Go get your shilling paycheck from billionaire Gabe. Again, I hope it is more than $0, cause nobody deserves to defend a rich asshole for free, everyone deserves a paycheck for doing things well. <3
That said there's one point I noticed that's making me feel very icky.
Wow. You're saying this as if level designers haven't started their careers by making custom levels for Doom, literally one of the earlier indie games by creator id. Hell, you're giving the discontinued popularity gate called greenlight more credit than it deserves. The truth is Valve wouldn't be here today without the Quake engine that id themselves made - they've driven more innovation than valve's regression and capitalism sold as innovation. Yes, indie games existed before Valve has, shocker I know.
And as for Linux, once again, *wine. Even then, I switched to Linux and stayed because the basic experience has been elevated, and all of that without using any Valve software. If the experience isn't better than it was before, I'd just go back to Windows. Besides, what is the point of Linux if I end up changing my unaccountable corporate master for another unaccountable corporate master, Valve?
I know all of this will fly over your head. This is for everyone else in the room who thinks a little bit of "good things" absolve one of responsibility. I can totally say Microsoft Windows was a positive influence because it made computing easy to access and develop for, but understandably nobody's going to forgive them for the billion bad things they've done in turn.
How do my words deny the provided statement in any way? How your words disprove the cited statement?
And Quake engine wouldn't exist without C++, C++ wouldn't exist without C, C wouldn't exist without assembler, and so on and so forth. That's how progress works. Inventing a wheel from scratch every time is hella stupid, and so is your take, captain obvious. Like everyone who licenced the ID Tech engine at the time, Valve built a huge amount of technology on top of it.
Come on, you're no longer even trying.
regression in what, dare i ask?
cool, but that's your personal experience, which is far from being universal.
define "unaccountable corporate master", and explain to me how did you manage to put a game publisher under a term like this.
You could... In an alternate reality where Windows is the only OS ever existed.
So now you're just babbling for the sake of babbling, coming up with the most braindead takes possible, while ignoring practically everything i say because i don't fall under the criteria of your tribe, thus inherently being a corpo billionaire shill. With this behaviour you're only proving my words about your inability to see nuance. I hope you're a kid, because that would at least mean some potential for intellectual development in the future.
Let's stop before you embarrass yourself further.
Cool story bro. btw, buy a mirror instead of using me as yours. I hope Gabe gives you a dollar to buy that mirror.
What a stupid question. See everything I have literally said directly to you. Read my replies and find out the answer. As someone once said, let's stop before you embarrass yourself further.