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Steam is a good service compared to the alternatives, but corpos will always be corpos. Having loyalty to any company, no matter how good they seem will inevitably lead to disappointment. That said....the vast majority of my game library is from steam, but I have been trying to get more of my games from GOG. Its best to be safe cause you never know when companies like valve will go mask mask off and become the next EA or Microslop.
That's what I hate about billionaires.
They all spend their money on luxury shit like this for themselves or other people like themselves.
None of them ever thinks of helping poor people get housing, food and healthcare.
Like imagine what you could do with that kind of cash. You don't even have to give it away, you can just run good businesses that aren't based on unsustainable greed.
Say you build decent housing and set the rents so the break-even date is 40 years from now, let your foundation own it, and kick back with a tall glass of milk. Say you build an insulin factory in Vermont and pump out pens at $7 each. Say you buy up some farmland and build proper greenhouses to grow food efficiently, allowing 90% of the land be rewilded.
Why in the fuck would you buy 3 Bugattis every year.
I actually support the rich spending money on extravagant yachts. The problem is when rich people hoard money and just use it to get richer. When they spend it, that money goes to employing people. Do you have any idea how many workers it takes to build a yacht? Then you have to hire people to maintain and run the thing. It's a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the working class.
When rich people try to use their money to "improve society" they inevitably end up using it to influence politics and to try and control things. After all, if your goal is to use your money to help to improve the world as best you see it, you quickly realize that the best bang for your buck is by buying politicians.
For example, imagine someone genuinely does want to spend a billion dollars to help people get medical care. You could spend that billion on paying people's medical bills, or you could spend a billion dollars lobbying for Medicare for all. If you're trying to spend money to change the world in a direction you feel is best, politicians are the best bang for your buck. So you end up with politicians being bought by various rich people, each tasked with enacting what the rich people view as the best path for the world. One way or another, it means that the wealthy completely control the government, rather than the people. And while you're probably in favor of Medicare for all, the rich people will be lobbying for whatever they think the world needs most. Their idea of charity might be spending a billion dollars to "protect babies" by lobbying against abortion.
I would rather the rich spend every penny they have on extravagant luxuries. Their ideas of charity are usually quite different from my own.
Gotta spend all that monopoly money some way.
Don't forget he bought his kid a racing team.
It's amazing you defend this guy for rent sitting because he's one of the good billionaire monopolies 🙄
The reason people like him even here where most billionaires are hated, is that he's doing essentially nothing to maintain the monopoly and Valve gives back to the community by working on Linux compatibility. Sweeney, despite having much less market share, is the one engaging in monopolistic practices (paying for exclusives in particular) and refuses to even consider Linux a potential target OS, he wants gaming to remain Windows-only.
He rather spent years fighting Apple to get Fortnite on iOS than adding support for Linux.
If Epic took like 10% of the budget they use for free games and timed exclusives and put that towards making their UX not dogshit, Valve wouldn't even have a monopoly.
It would help if they also supported Linux and open source.
What I've heard is he wanted to refit the yacht that he bought, so it could support a deep sea submersible.
So... to expedite the refit, he essentially just bought the entire dockyard, the company that owns it. Literal fuck you money lol.
And he does legit use that yacht/remote submersible to sail out to deep seas, exploring the hadal zones south of Japan, other places.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/gabe-newell-inkfish-unclassified-ocean-creature/
As I've said in other threads, dude is just actually playing Subnautica IRL.
https://youtube.com/@inkfishexpeditions
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-explorer-vessel-08172025.php
https://www.vard.com/articles/inkfish-and-vard-signs-contract-on-groundbreaking-research-vessel
I think these are all ... revolving around the same ship, not 100% sure.
Yeah he's a billionaire, but he at least seems to be an old school tycoon in the sense of... doing actual philanthropy, instead of fancy accounting fraud / money laundering with a non profit happy face on top.
Also, barely anyone knows much about this, so... probably not a naked ploy for positive PR?
EDIT:
If he buys an entire island, or starts trying to do 'sea-steading', then we should be concerned.
That shit is... insane diamond hands crypto ancap fucking nonsense, unless or untill someone actually comes up with an actual well thought out plan... So far all I've seen is complete idiocy at being anything than an elaborate fraud.
If Gabe goes full Andrew Ryan/Cave Johnson, then yeah, we have a problem.
To my knowledge... he basically just has more money than he knows what to do with, so he tries to fund things that would be difficult to fund otherwise, that he also finds neat.
He's also basically founded a seemingly much more legitimate than Elon's neuralink type thing, that does novel research into BCI/brain implants, but like, targetted at actual medical breakthroughs, not like, trying to make a mass consumer general use product.
https://starfishneuroscience.com/
Judge for yourself of course, I've not deeply looked into these things, just apparently a bit more than most.
I can say that I haven't heard of any pigs or monkeys being horrifically tortured, so that's probably good.
Yeah he’s a billionaire, but he at least seems to be an old school tycoon in the sense of… doing actual philanthropy, instead of fancy accounting fraud / money laundering with a non profit happy face on top.
He owns a fleet o megayachts and one of the biggest companies making these who commissioned megayachts for bezos and russian oligarchs, he's just a piece of shit like all the others. We are on the verge of a climate disaster, one of these boats consume in one hour as much you will do in your lifetime, stop wasting your time defending this idiot, he's not a scientist.
To my knowledge… he basically just has more money than he knows what to do with,
To my knowledge you don't end up with more money than you know what to do with by being a good person. Valve did a lot of shit such as promoting gambling to kids
You are insanely aggro for basically no reason.
Never said he was a scientist. Showed that he hires scientists to make use of his toys.
Yep, he's a billionaire, thats bad, i'd prefer he'd just give every steam user a proportional refund with his excess money, that would do more practical good.
Yep, promoting/facilitating gambling to/for kids is in fact immensely shitty and should be stopped, victims should be compensated.
Yep, owning a small fleet of megayachts is very bad for the climate, very selfish, frankly ridiculous.
There, are you satisfied?
Done assuming my thoughts and positions?
Edit: I was being mean but it is a cool boat so I'll give the benefit of the doubt.
friendly reminder that valve is not your friend. they operate the way they do because that's their business strategy to make the most money long term.
I like steam I send them a christmas card every year with my life updates.
Fairly happy to find a business that wants to make money long term. Pretty rare these days. I would say thats a good thing, wouldnt you?
How do they do it? Looks like expanding into the open hardware space, the open source space, have good customer service and avoid ads except to promote games.
And the alternative is what? GOG?
In the end they are just a store front, so it isnt even like they are the only place to buy a product, yet somehow they are the only ones that seem to even give a shit about me playing games on Linux.
And then there are the employees. As far as we know (please if you work at valve say something) they are the highest compensated people in the it/game industry.
Valve is legendary for being a good employer. I remember hearing about an employee who tried to tender a resignation when he was diagnosed with something chronic and debilitating. Can't remember what. Anyway, point is, he decided he couldnt do his job, tried to resign, Newell refused to accept it and told him "your job at Valve is to get better. Come back when you're better." So the employee kept his pay, his benefits, all of it. And this was right around the release of HL2, so Valve was not yet the monopoly market maker it is today. Gabe Newell is a billionaire. He may or may not be a good person. But he is a forward thinker and a good boss.
Yeah there was some leaked payroll data around 2021, so its old info, but with bonuses, profit sharing and base salary the average compensation is something like 1.4 million per employee.
Way back when Gabe said he didnt want employees he wanted partners and they would share the success. I don't know what its like today though.
I would say thats a good thing, wouldnt you?
Yes, that's why I simply reminded folks that they are a business and not your friend. So many people jumping to Valve's defense over a perceived slight makes me feel the reminder is necessary.
No corporation or billionaire is your friend. No matter how nice they appear just because the rest are genocidal sociopaths.
Not all of them are necessarily evil either, but regardless of their intentions, they're almost always a net loss for society.
Regardless, we should reward socially beneficial behavior. Billionaires are humans, and as such trainable through a correct reward structure. Harm reduction is important.
That's...that's how a business should operate. Not chasing quarterly reviews and stock prices, but being in business as long as feasibly possible. Making products and/or services that meet the need of the market and continual improvement of them.
Instead most businesses, especially dealing with video games, are ran by short term thinking psychopaths who only care how a quarter looks and not the long term sustainability of the entire company. They saw a massive influx during the Covid lockdowns and didn't realize that was temporary growth for a particular difficult time so keep chasing those kinds of profits with layoffs, studio closures.
He's also not an enemy though. For an extremely wealthy person he's a decent guy imo. Then again, I don't know everything about him
Quite a lot of people thought Elon was a decent guy once upon a time.
I just think Gabe is a bit smarter in what he says and does publicly. Most extremely wealthy people seem to be higher in measures of narcissistic traits, self-entitlement, and egocentrism.
Elon had a full time PR team that was pushing that image since he wanted to be known and popular, then he started posting stuff himself and we all saw the mask fall off. I don't think Gabe has the same thing since he seems to try and stay out of the spotlight as much as possible.
Elon also had staff who described their actual job as essentially jangling keys in front of Elon, because he has a tendency to just randomly have an insane idea and decide everyone is doing that now.
So, they had to distract him from making too many stupid decisions, fucking up workflows and procesesses. He's just an idiot, who's probably mildly aspy/autistic, and that got PR transformed into 'quirky genius'. But look into what happened at PayPal, or Tesla, anything. He's incompetent at anything other than corporate ratfuckery, he's never coded or designed anything novel or useful.
This uh... was from Tesla, a decade ago. Now of course, its all sycophants.
Compare that to Valve's odd, flat-ish hierarchy, 'just work on something cool and be useful' work culture.
Gabe has been known to occasionally bring the hammer down, but the vast amount of Valve's style, intentionally created and maintained by Gabe is... hands off. Hire the actual best, they'll direct themselves, kind of thing.
Ain't perfect, but... probably a lot less of an insane tyrannical bastard than Elon.
You are not my friend, doesn't mean you are my enemy either.
No, Valve is privately owned. That means the company does whatever the owners want it to do. Unlike public companies which can be sued by their own shareholders of they don't pursue profits hard enough.
That's not to say we should blindly idolize a billionaire, but he and in turn Valve can in fact do things that are friendly to consumers.
I think Gabe acts more like the European rich. They are still pieces of shit, but they learned a long time ago to STFU about their money after a long history involving guillotines and the like that the U.S. hasn’t experienced to the same extent just yet.
Yeah, og only more companies thought that way. Most seem to only care about making money in the short term.
Hardly surprising, the dude fucking loves boats. It's too bad he isn't fascinated with the age of sail. Billionaires would be cooler if they sailed in treasure galleons and were assailed by pirates.
Billionaires would be cooler if there were mythical creatures that don‘t exist but we tell stories about heroes who slay them.
Billionaires would be cooler if their obsession was the bettering of mankind