Valve invented or normalised a ton of crap that's plaguing modern gaming: game launchers, always online DRM, microtransactions, achivements, lootboxes...
I'm not saying you should stop using Steam. Go ahead, buy the Frame, VR is awesome and it looks like a really solid headset, but do it without kissing Gabe's ass if you can. Corpos are not your friends.
For me, it's when people complain that a game/system/platform doesn't have them. Some games and systems don't need or want to gamify playing games and that's okay
Marketing: the end product just isn't right. We need to make it more fun. You know like a game.
dev: What are you talking about.
Marketing: There's this new thing called gamification. Let's do that.
Dev: First off thats not new, its been around for ages. Whatever, what are you even talking about?
Marketing: Yeah you know, make it fun! Give people awards for accomplishing certain tasks or reaching milestones. Lots of flashy lights and celebratory music. We do it in presentations and training all the time.
Dev: That's what xp, leveling, magic items, special skills, etc are. Your asking me to gamify a fucking video game?!?!
Marketing: Yeah exactly! Its gonna be awesome!
To be clear I don't think achievement s are bad. I don't personally care about them. This is just how I imagine the conversation went when they were thought of.
I don't care if they exist or not. The complaints that XYZ doesn't have them is what makes me dislike them. Like who cares if Switch doesn't have achievements? Go play the game and have fun
They're nothing but a skinner box that's supposed to keep you playing games for longer. It's the same type of instant gratification built into most mobile game, but applied to everything else.
In a system where you pay once for the game, isn't that a good thing? It lets you enjoy the game for longer instead of making you constantly buy new games, thus spending less money for the same amount of enjoyment.
It's meant to keep you playing after you stop enjoying said game. Besides, pay once? Shit like this is very often paired with the free-to-play and microstransactions model.
I really dont think its that bad. I can see the argument that they should be able to be disabled for people with OCD or something. I used to feel some kind of FOMO for not 100% every game.
Right, that's a fair criticism with regards to microtransactions. I don't know much about those kinds of games though, so I can't really say much about it.
My partner bought Skyrim twice (Steam and Switch) and 100%'d both, and now is going through the same process with BG3. I'm just thinking about how the achievement system is acting like a multiplier to the game's value in this instance.
None of that was invented by Valve. "Normalize" is subjective but I would argue they didn't do any of that either.
Launchers existed for a long, long time before Steam- part of what made Steam so successful was having a centralized launcher for games from a lot of different companies together. Before then there was usually a separate launcher for each game.
Online DRM has existed for as long as the Internet was ubiquitous enough to get away with it. Offline DRM existed before that. Even back in the 80's games would ship with all sorts of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only 2 Valve games that ever had DRM were Artifact and DOTA 2, both of which were online multiplayer-only games, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Maple Story is pretty widely considered to be the first game with micro transactions, and they were in the form of loot boxes. By the time Team Fortress came out the concept was already popularized in MMO's, Facebook games like Farmville, and FIFA.
Achievements aren't something I really care about, but game had those concepts for years. I remember playing Spyro 2 as a kid and tracking down all the skill points. Sure it doesn't use the word "achievement" but even today Sony uses the word "Trophy" to mean the same thing.
Corporations aren't your friend of course, it's just weird that people think Valve invented these things. And Valve's implementations are some of the most benign and consumer-friendly cases in the industry.
The launcher i consider a positive - it's a great way to organize my library, including non-steam games. There's tons of free features I use all the time, like Remote Play, free Cloud Saves, friend management. It's great for managing inputs from all sorts of different controllers, managing systems with multiple displays, allowing me to control everything with a controller without having to set it down to use my mouse and keyboard. They have great mod support for the games that use it. There's tons more features I don't use. It's not just a launcher like EA Play or UPlay- it's a full platform. It's so useful that I even added GOG Galaxy as a non-steam game.
Any business needs to balance the needs of its stakeholders. Owners, partners, creditors, consumers, employees, governments, etc. Valve is one of the fairest companies left alive in 2025 at balancing all of these entities, and yet in every online discussion about them someone always feels the need to pipe in and be like "well aktually they are secretly very bad!", just because they don't have the power to stop other companies from being shitty. They don't have the bargaining power to tell Sega to get rid of Denuvo on a games from prior generations selling for $20. They don't have the bargaining power to Ubisoft or Larian to drop their annoying launchers. They don't have the power to tell other publishers and devs to stop adding pay-to-win mechanics. They don't have the power to stand up to payment processors that are demanding certain content be removed from the store.
Valve DOES have the power to promote Linux as a legitimately viable operating system for gamers, behind Linux enthusiasts. They have the power to get Microsoft to drop their ridiculous store. They have the power to get Ubisoft to at least add their games to Steam, even if you need a dumb launcher still. They have the power to clearly and consistently label games with DRM in their store so consumers can make informed decisions without spending hours digging through the legalize or EULA's or doing research on enthusiast forums.
It's fair to question whether Valve's 30% cut is justified for every publisher, though we also know that some publishers have been able to make separate deals at times. I'm sure you can find other things that are fair to question. It's really weird to accuse people of "kissing Gabe's ass" just for recognizing that Steam is the best platform for a consumer to use right now.
Blaming game launchers on Steam is like blaming streaming becoming unusable on Netflix. They were having success being (probably) the first ones to do it and when other companies saw that they tried to copy their success, only to find out that what made the original product successful was that they were the only ones doing it and that was (unlike the new landscape the companies just created) incredibly useful.
The sad fact of the matter is that while having a one stop shop for anything sounds great, once a solution in a certain field gets successful the other companies trying to achive the same success will fly in like vultures and make it forever impossible to have just one service that unites everything into one neat package.
Got a $20m yacht? Sell it. Oh, youcre forced to sell it for $50k because nobody will give you more? That's just the free market, clearly it's only worth $50k.
Paid $75m to build your house? Well someone is offering you $175k and you'd better take it.
And you own a company worth $100m? No you don't, it was already taken from you and turned into a worker-owned co-op.
After all the sales and seizures, you've got $23.1m in cash, and just 1m more in the bank? OK, dude, we cool.
The Sovereign Fund for Humanity's Poor. Even if the wealth is stacking up that fast all anyone has to do is set up a trust fund with that name, the goal of using said wealth to fund every single human with a trust fund that will eliminate poverty in their life, and a board of directors that MUST contain two fiduciaries but only one from any given major Megalopolis, as well as three data analysts from OxFam. Once that's setup, all you have to do is setup automatic deposits of every single penny above $100,000,000 and every other rich person can do the same. This causes everyone to see that every other ultra rich person is just greedier than literal dragons.
Their salaries would be baked in. They get $1,000,000 per year. This is so that each is a position that is given to the highest scoring person in Ethics that just graduated, whenever a position is available
I agree with this sentiment, but given a choice, I believe Gabe would make the right one and spend his wealth to lose billionaire status.
His supposed exploitation was not by his own design, but rather by luck - the sheer benefit of riding a privately owned and benevelontly steered surfboard on top of the waves of a collapsing capitalist society.
Basically, there's a meme about all other companies shooting themselves in the foot so Gabe always benefits, and part of that is in the way those companies fucked and manipulated their control of capital and markets. Gabe benefits just by being one of the few that can afford to participate in that system others rigged.
So he simply rigs it the least, and wins by providing the platform with the least greedy problems. Far far less than he could given his position.
IMHO, despite all controversies, Steams cut of profits from providing equal access to game visibility despite creator, nationality, background, etc, has legitimately opened the door for nearly anyone to be successful on their platform. For all the tools and services they provide, they ask for literally the smallest cut compared to any other publishing platform.
Gabe could destroy that to his benefit on a whim, and instead he over designs it to make it possible for nearly anyone to try game dev if they do the work needed to develop for them.
To hold so much capital simply for providing some form of equality to access the same in a system that overwhelming benefits others with more resources is in no way greedy imo. It's being the person with the only fire extinguisher who knows how to use it in a burning building: popular.
A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can't sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he's rolling in other assets and cash, too
It doesn't have publicly-traded shares because it's a private company, but it's still correct to say someone has stock in a private company corporation (which isn't relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don't stop existing just because they're not for sale to the public. It's an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it's in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.
It is nitpicking, but in legal terms you could say he has shares in the company but not stocks. Stocks refers specifically to publicly traded shares, that is to say shares sold on a stock market. Shares is the more broad term as it can refer not only to stocks but also private equity units of various types. Valve is a Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, which have Membership Units as the type of shares held by owners, which differs from stocks both in terms of tax treatment and limitations on how they can be transacted.
It's nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they're publicly traded. It becomes plural when it's shares of multiple corporation.
However, LLCs aren't corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I'm in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC's shares are still considered stock, and I've been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion's been that the public/private distinction isn't the important one and I've been arguing the definition of a word that's defined differently in the relevant country.
The dispicableness of billionaires is measured by their actions not their worth. And despite being of high worth, Gabes actions are unquestionably not greedy. He's doing almost everything he can to minimize his wealth in favor of equality to access Steam as a game dev.
If he wanted to, he could charge far more than $100 to develop for them, and buy several more yachts.
But he hasn't.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
His yachts aren't indicative of his greed, but his benevolence in the face of it.
Show me a single other company the size of Valve that has chosen to forgo profit over access to something like Steam to make money yourself. That's basically non existent in the year 2025 aside from Valve. I'm not going to judge Gabe as a bad person for profiting from that. He could be profiting much much more and is choosing access for nearly everyone else instead.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you'll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren't also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don't realise people won't want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.
There's obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.
I see granting access for anyone to make games for Steam as a good cause.
The opportunity cost for what profit could be made by closing that is multitudes of yachts worth.
Just because you do not value this as a good cause does not mean it is not.
Does Gabe have more yachts than are needed? Yes. But again, you can't just say he's greedy because he has them. That's being incredibly biased.
Instead, how about you tell me what actions of his has made him greedy that don't involve his assets?
I can name hundreds of ways Musk should be drawn and quartered based on his actions that have nothing to do with his wealth, but rather his actual documented choices.
What choices / actions / or anything of actual greed has Gabe done that you can point to?
It's like saying anything with a swastika on it is for Nazis without realizing Hindus have been using a right oriented Swastika to represent good fortune for hundreds of years.
Gabe Newall has done the following with his 11 Billion fortune:
Co-founded "The Heart of Racing" car racing team that raises money for Children's charity.
Donates heavily to the Seattle Children's Hospital and several others around the world.
Founded Foundry10, a non profit education company that helps neuro divergent kids learn through new methods of education
Started InkFish to expand the scientific study of our oceans and is now the second highest individual donor towards marine research on the planet.
Their actions speak louder than the symbols they use suggest. Even when those symbols are Yachts.
He has 11 Billion. Everyone else even close to his level of market control has several magnitudes more. Why does he have so little when he owns a virtual monopoly on digital distribution?
Because he's not in it for maximizing his bank account.
The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn't mean that he's not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.
Fundamentally, I don't think we're going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there's an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it's much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he's given anything away that he wasn't legally required to means that he's not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can't be reconciled, it's not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.
The reason I've been replying at all is that some of the things you've stated to be facts are untrue, not that I'm trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.
The 364-foot Leviathan was designed for billionaire gaming visionary Gabe Newell, who acquired the Dutch shipyard this past April.
Leviathan is the latest addition to Newell’s Inkfish fleet and will be used to further scientific research in the marine sector. Occupying the place of the standard beach club is a fully equipped dive center, laboratory, and a hospital. There’s even a 3-D printing workshop where the crew can create spare or replacement parts. “Yachts have great potential to serve as platforms for scientific research,” adds Newell. “It’s about recognizing that you’re part of a broader community and ensuring the yacht’s presence adds value to the communities around it.”
You are just continuing to make assumptions based entirely on the assets he owns instead of his behaviour.
Something I keep pointing out, and is why I have also been responding.
I am completely on your side and feel that anyone with over a billion is an ethical and moral burden. However, I'm also wise enough to recognize that as a goal to strive towards not a destination to judge against. So I'm not going to chastise those actively working towards that goal, even if they are a billionaire.
There is no such thing as a good billionaire. There are billionaires who might be temporarily aligned with you but make no mistake, none of them will love you back..
Valve is in a very unique spot where employees are all paid well because of the low amount of employees they have and the massive income they generate; in their employee reviews you typically don't really see low salary as a reason to leave.
What I'm talking about is that there isn't a way to "withdraw" your money like the illegal sites let you. So no, there isn't a way to gamble through Steam.
In fact, Steam does what they have the power to do in reporting those sites and getting them taken down.
Idealizing billionaires is cringe. Eat them all. Just because he's not a complete asshole like all the other parasites doesn't make him a good person. He's still a parasite.
There's an argument to be made that it's too high of a cut, especially these days. A lot of this money has funded great improvements to the gaming ecosystem and many open source projects. The major competing storefronts/launchers do not come even slightly close to the feature set that Steam provides, but they have tried attracting users through exclusivity deals. It's very telling that some successful competitors (like itch or gog) actually offer some unique benefits and aren't attached to some incredibly controversial corporations...
Valve isn't free from criticism and their role as a monopolist should definitely be scrutinized, especially as companies often radically change for the worse in behaviour and culture, but a lot of this critical attention was instigated by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney who can frankly gargle my nuts.
Look, he can be a rich guy and a leader. 1 billion is a decent line in the sand of "sorry, you own too much". He's certainly not as nakedly evil as most the rest of his ilk.
I usually put it at $10M, and there are specific arguments for this.
The Trinity Study used a standard retirement portfolio and then studied its results using a sliding window starting from 1925. Let's say you retire at 60 and expect to have another 20 years of life. This time period covers good stock market performance and bad, high inflation and low. It's a very robust result, and the US and even worldwide economy would have to fundamentally change for it to be invalidated. (You could argue that Trump is driving things in that direction, but that's a whole other discussion.)
How much of the portfolio can you withdraw each year and be safe?
The study starts with a percentage withdraw rate, which is increased by the rate of inflation each year. It then checks if the portfolio would have run out of money before the person is expected to die. This resulted in the 4% rule where you start withdrawing 4% the first year and then increase by inflation. It's extremely unlikely that you'll run out of money in a standard retirement period.
If you withdraw 3% or 2%, you won't run out of money even if you live forever.
So let's take a 2.5% withdraw rate. This is extremely conservative and should basically last forever. US government bond rates are typically higher than that (but not always), so we're not even that tied to the stock market on this one. If you had $10M, take 2.5% the first year and increase by inflation each year after, you would perpetually have the purchasing power of $250k/year.
If you have $250k/year, you can live very comfortably anywhere on Earth. This is the part where someone always chimes in "what about the Bay area or New York?"
First, with this plan, you can live anywhere. You're not tied to an area by a job. Maybe don't chose high cost of living areas.
OK, let's say there's family or something else that's specifically tying you to those areas. Median income in Manhattan is $106k, and the other burrows are significantly lower. San Fransisco median is $136k. I'm quite certain you can live comfortably on $250k in those areas if you absolutely had to for some reason.
Also, don't forget that unlike all us working stiffs, you wouldn't have to put another dime into a 401k or any other retirement plan. Your $10M already covers that. Feel free to spend it all on luxuries.
So that's the limit. We can increase the $10M based on future inflation, but higher than that is just wanking about how much you have, and there's no reason society should respect that.
You can argue they should be more charitable, but that really can't be required. You could also say taxes should be higher past a certain point, but they currently aren't and that's not any individual's fault.
Also, I'm using Taylor swift as an example, but I mean more generally a person that captures worldwide attention for their art.
I believe a moral person would not horde such obscene wealth while people are struggling and starving unnecessarily. Were not talking about just being "well off" - It's more money than a person could need in countless lifetimes. So yes, I think she should be charitable. Edit: Or taxed.
In my opinion if anyone has billions of dollars and hasn't given a majority of it away to charity or those in need, that person is on some level at least somewhat an evil person.
Sure, much of it would be tied up in stocks and stuff that legally can't be sold for specific purposes or timeframes, but if you have net worth in the billions and any stocks that could be sold for cash and then donated it should be. Or if you have an annual income that's much more than you need to live an extremely comfortable life and then you just spend and invest the excess instead of donate.
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments transferred to the IRS annually, to be auctioned slowly over time. The first $10 million held by a natural person may be exempted from this requirement. No exemptions for artificial "persons".
If I am not mistaken, Steam is one of the highest paid companies in the world, if not the. Perhaps still not fair relative to contribution, yet exemplary compared to the rest.
I do believe that Gabe is one of the better/more benevolent winners of an inherently unfair and now definitely broken system.
Valve encourages and keeps the system broken just as much as Microsoft or Nintendo does. They all try really hard not to compete.
They do have high salaries, but it's also a ridiculously small company for the money they make. Gaben is still making money hand over fist, and the employees making big money are all on the admin team.
Steam could charge a 5% fee and give the rest to developers. The services and salaries would still stay the same. It would give Gaben enough money to cover his billion dollar boats fleets maintenance cost, just not enough to buy himself a new yacht every two years.
steam charges the industry standard...if they lowered it, and their market share naturally increased even further they would be even more open to some kind of anti-monopoly lawsuit (which are very often put forward by less effective companies, who just want the monopoly themselves. ie. Epic)
Anti-trust law exists to prevent companies from overcharging consumers, something they can do when they don't have competition.
Valve keeping their prices far higher than costs is something that can open them up to anti-trust scrutiny. Competitively lowering their prices while still maintaining profitability cannot, as that is the exact goal of anti-trust laws in the first place.
It's also fucking wild that gamers hate Tim Sweeney so much. What has he used his fortune to do? Build a reasonably priced and powerful third party game engine that makes it easy for indie developers to build games, spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to break up Apple and Google's walled garden 30% bullshit, launched a PC store to try and do the same with Steam, and bought tens of thousands of acres of US land to preserve for nature conservation. Oh what a moustache twirling monster!
look into the history of anti-trust laws actual application across US history, just like everything else around our government...it's a tool for whoever holds power to either ratfuck funds or otherwise manipulate markets, for personal gain/at the direction of some other company.
sweeney is on record as saying he just wants the monopoly for himself, and engages in far more manipulative/anticonsumer behavior than steam does, like buying exclusivity deals
some monopolies form because all the competition is just incompetent
It doesn't matter how the monopoly forms, Gaben is still one of the rat fucks profiting from it. He wouldn't have been able to spend a billion dollars on boats if he wasn't.
Whatever arguments you think you have, ask yourself first if they apply to Musk or Bezos. They probably do.
A billionaire who gives away 99% of their wealth to the poorest, first and exclusively, isn't a billionaire, and still has enough money (maybe more!) for the rest of time.
He's just another fat dragon who got rich exploiting people through ownership of capital.
Then he got children hooked on gambling because one billion wasn't enough.
He deserves to be locked up like the rest of them.
This is really simple. If you have more than a 1000 million dollars. Every day you decide to keep it instead of saving lives and helping people. It will never be moral
"Billionaire" is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be "millionaire". The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It's just inflation.
Plus, a lot of "billionaires" are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It's a "theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that".
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don't expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
In order to be incorporated, a company has to have stock. Private companies still have shares even if they aren't traded on public exchanges.
It's possible that Gabe owns 100% of Valve's stock, but it's also possible that he's sold some to other people or entities. Originally when Valve was founded, it was a split between Gabe and Mike Harrington, but Harrington reportedly sold his shares to Gabe when he left.
It's also very likely that Gabe owns shares in other corporations, even just as personal retirement investments. But that's not what I was talking about.
If it were to be a revolution he would be given the chance. Just be a director of valve for a normal director salary. If he take it then he would be just another worker.
Valve makes tonnes of money from loot boxes or whatever they’re called. Basically a form of gambling.
It also just so happens that a great way of making a shit load of money is making it super easy for people to buy from you. Valves big competitive advantage is just… not fucking that up. A surprising number of companies fuck that up.
And as someone else said, Gabe doesn’t have to be a billionaire. He could use his phenomenal wealth to build hospitals and help the poor, rather than building his own little private navy.
Valve is doing a lot that will make people like them, but they’re still a huge corporation, and Gabe is still a billionaire.
I personally don't like the idea of murder, I'd if we-the-people get into power, just pass laws that taxes them, then enforce the law as such. If they resist, jailtime for tax evasion.
For those that are exceedingly cruel with their time as a billionaire, they get tried, judged by a jury of average people, 2/3 is a conviction (as opposed to the unanimity required now), life imprisonment.
Billionaires and their heirs are deprived of political rights.
Easy peaceful transition. Zero bloodshed
I don't like bloodshed, because once that starts, once we "okay" mob killings, people are gonna attack anyone they don't like, including small bussiness owners they had a grudge against in the past.
I have empathy, I don't wanna see the streets filled with blood.
As far as I know Valve isn't one of those companies that employes a hundred thousand minimum-wage slaves, but one that's gotten big, by actually innovating, which is like the only potentially good aspect of capitalism and seems to not be something most corporations do anymore. Of course were this question to ever become relevant he would have to give up most of his wealth, but it's not like he is one of those billionaires that eat babies for breakfast.
Well no. Valve is involved in a lot of actual gambling with csgo etc.
How they are ignoring and willfully profiting from all of the skin casinos etc. is my biggest problem with them.
Despite that they are still one of the best big companies i know of.
Same bullshit people use to ban things "for the children" counter strike is not targeted at children, why should Valve prevent people from selling their skins on 3rd party sites?
Freedom is bad because children? Porn should be banned because children, flavored cigs should be banned because children, flavored alcohol should be banned because children.
Such a stupid argument
Edit: To be clear, I don't like lootboxes and do not play games that use them, I also am not a fan of alcohol or cigs and acknowledge they cause harm, however I see it as a freedom issue, just because I don't like it doesn't mean I should decide what others can do with their body within reason. "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins" children are just an excuse to censor things that parents can't be bothered to stop themselves.
Not really... that's kind of the whole point of fiat currencies, you can always mint more.
Most billionaires don't even have any money. At that level they don't need it. They don't pay for things. They just get loans they'll never pay back, with older loans as collateral.
The problem with billionaires isn't money (though billionaires are one of the main problems with money). The problem with billionaires is that their fiat, virtual, wealth gives them an unfair amount of influence over everyone else's lives, and that they alone get to enjoy a living standard (being able to get all your necessities and live a fulfilling life essentially for free) that should (and could, with an adequate distribution of resources) be available to everyone.
Let's say there are 100 tables in the world.
If one person has 50 tables then it means everyone else has less. If mister tables aquires an additional table, can we agree it is coming from someone else ? Someone poorer.
Even if the governement can make a new table to replace it, the fact that mr table is sucking up all tables on the market is still a problem for every one else.
You say they don't have money, but if they live well, buy everything they want and influence the world as they see fit, I feel it's disingenuous to say they don't actually have money. They're certainly sucking up your tables.
I'm going on a tangeant here, but it's exactly why you don't want your government to be cash positive. A government in the green is taking that money from someplace. A government in the red is actually helping everyone else not drown. It's all a matter of where that money is going. That explains why the vast majority of countries run in the red.
A government paying it's own debt is the same as deleting money from the economy.
I want to say that Gabe is a good guy, because he's a gamer like many of us, and because Valve is so pro-consumer, and because supposedly the company is mostly rid of hierarchy, but he's still a billionaire unfortunately.
Gabe's fleet of yatchs is worth about 1 billion (6 boats and a sub or two). The yearly maintenance cost is estimated to be between 100 to 150 million per year. He essentially taxes a whole industry and most gamers because the soft monopoly and collusion he has going on with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo let's him.
This is literally the definition of boot licking. Please try to think farther then the line his marketing team draws for you.
He's not gonna give you a million dollars or a big wet kiss on the mouth dude, you can stop sticking up for the big nerd. He's a billionaire and chooses to continue being a billionaire - that is a BIG thing that makes him a bad person.
A shitty attitude, or an honest recognition of a massively unequal wealth distribution seeing very few very selfish people at the top hoard gigantic sums of money seemingly with the goal to just get more money, while so many of us struggle to get by working one, two, three jobs?
Because I'll agree, there's a lot of very pouty people on here that will bang on and moan endlessly about absolute bullshit. The insanity that one person can accumulate a billion dollars though? That's not bullshit. That's something to moan about.
Sadly, he is. This is what the enemy looks like. It is simply not possible to ethically acquire even a tenth of the wealth that he hoards for himself. The damage he has caused in acquiring and retaining that wealth is far greater than his net worth.
The sooner he starts his redemption arc, the better.
See, the thing is, once you eat the one percent, the bottom eighty percent want to eat.The top twenty percent and the bottom seventy percent want to eat.The top thirty percent.And then we just become the human centipede
Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.
Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.
Now, the world's children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.
Honestly you shouldn't judge anyone as a group, even billionaires. They are not all evil, probably mostly evil though even if just in the basic sense of destroying the world for profit, both physically and in terms of human happiness.
The time we spent the past 20 years fighting surveillance, private political funding, and proprietary systems will never be given back to us. That is something more valuable than money that the billionaires have collectively taken from us. When we do finally get our rights and humanity reinstated properly, that will be a lot of near wasted time for millions of people. Gave was one of the good ones. He had principles no matter how much money he had which is commendable. I consider Bill Gates to be one of the good billionaires too. Windows wasn't really bad until he left the company.
Valve invented or normalised a ton of crap that's plaguing modern gaming: game launchers, always online DRM, microtransactions, achivements, lootboxes...
I'm not saying you should stop using Steam. Go ahead, buy the Frame, VR is awesome and it looks like a really solid headset, but do it without kissing Gabe's ass if you can. Corpos are not your friends.
whats wrong with game achivments?
For me, it's when people complain that a game/system/platform doesn't have them. Some games and systems don't need or want to gamify playing games and that's okay
They didn't invent them. The Xbox 360 already had achievements years before them.
I didn't say Valve did. I said why I don't like achievement systems or, I guess more accurately, why I don't think everything needs them
I'm glad you deleted your comment because it had nothing to do with my point
Marketing: the end product just isn't right. We need to make it more fun. You know like a game.
dev: What are you talking about.
Marketing: There's this new thing called gamification. Let's do that.
Dev: First off thats not new, its been around for ages. Whatever, what are you even talking about?
Marketing: Yeah you know, make it fun! Give people awards for accomplishing certain tasks or reaching milestones. Lots of flashy lights and celebratory music. We do it in presentations and training all the time.
Dev: That's what xp, leveling, magic items, special skills, etc are. Your asking me to gamify a fucking video game?!?!
Marketing: Yeah exactly! Its gonna be awesome!
To be clear I don't think achievement s are bad. I don't personally care about them. This is just how I imagine the conversation went when they were thought of.
I don't care if they exist or not. The complaints that XYZ doesn't have them is what makes me dislike them. Like who cares if Switch doesn't have achievements? Go play the game and have fun
They're nothing but a skinner box that's supposed to keep you playing games for longer. It's the same type of instant gratification built into most mobile game, but applied to everything else.
In a system where you pay once for the game, isn't that a good thing? It lets you enjoy the game for longer instead of making you constantly buy new games, thus spending less money for the same amount of enjoyment.
It's meant to keep you playing after you stop enjoying said game. Besides, pay once? Shit like this is very often paired with the free-to-play and microstransactions model.
I really dont think its that bad. I can see the argument that they should be able to be disabled for people with OCD or something. I used to feel some kind of FOMO for not 100% every game.
Right, that's a fair criticism with regards to microtransactions. I don't know much about those kinds of games though, so I can't really say much about it.
My partner bought Skyrim twice (Steam and Switch) and 100%'d both, and now is going through the same process with BG3. I'm just thinking about how the achievement system is acting like a multiplier to the game's value in this instance.
None of that was invented by Valve. "Normalize" is subjective but I would argue they didn't do any of that either.
Launchers existed for a long, long time before Steam- part of what made Steam so successful was having a centralized launcher for games from a lot of different companies together. Before then there was usually a separate launcher for each game.
Online DRM has existed for as long as the Internet was ubiquitous enough to get away with it. Offline DRM existed before that. Even back in the 80's games would ship with all sorts of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only 2 Valve games that ever had DRM were Artifact and DOTA 2, both of which were online multiplayer-only games, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Maple Story is pretty widely considered to be the first game with micro transactions, and they were in the form of loot boxes. By the time Team Fortress came out the concept was already popularized in MMO's, Facebook games like Farmville, and FIFA.
Achievements aren't something I really care about, but game had those concepts for years. I remember playing Spyro 2 as a kid and tracking down all the skill points. Sure it doesn't use the word "achievement" but even today Sony uses the word "Trophy" to mean the same thing.
Corporations aren't your friend of course, it's just weird that people think Valve invented these things. And Valve's implementations are some of the most benign and consumer-friendly cases in the industry.
The launcher i consider a positive - it's a great way to organize my library, including non-steam games. There's tons of free features I use all the time, like Remote Play, free Cloud Saves, friend management. It's great for managing inputs from all sorts of different controllers, managing systems with multiple displays, allowing me to control everything with a controller without having to set it down to use my mouse and keyboard. They have great mod support for the games that use it. There's tons more features I don't use. It's not just a launcher like EA Play or UPlay- it's a full platform. It's so useful that I even added GOG Galaxy as a non-steam game.
Any business needs to balance the needs of its stakeholders. Owners, partners, creditors, consumers, employees, governments, etc. Valve is one of the fairest companies left alive in 2025 at balancing all of these entities, and yet in every online discussion about them someone always feels the need to pipe in and be like "well aktually they are secretly very bad!", just because they don't have the power to stop other companies from being shitty. They don't have the bargaining power to tell Sega to get rid of Denuvo on a games from prior generations selling for $20. They don't have the bargaining power to Ubisoft or Larian to drop their annoying launchers. They don't have the power to tell other publishers and devs to stop adding pay-to-win mechanics. They don't have the power to stand up to payment processors that are demanding certain content be removed from the store.
Valve DOES have the power to promote Linux as a legitimately viable operating system for gamers, behind Linux enthusiasts. They have the power to get Microsoft to drop their ridiculous store. They have the power to get Ubisoft to at least add their games to Steam, even if you need a dumb launcher still. They have the power to clearly and consistently label games with DRM in their store so consumers can make informed decisions without spending hours digging through the legalize or EULA's or doing research on enthusiast forums.
It's fair to question whether Valve's 30% cut is justified for every publisher, though we also know that some publishers have been able to make separate deals at times. I'm sure you can find other things that are fair to question. It's really weird to accuse people of "kissing Gabe's ass" just for recognizing that Steam is the best platform for a consumer to use right now.
Blaming game launchers on Steam is like blaming streaming becoming unusable on Netflix. They were having success being (probably) the first ones to do it and when other companies saw that they tried to copy their success, only to find out that what made the original product successful was that they were the only ones doing it and that was (unlike the new landscape the companies just created) incredibly useful.
The sad fact of the matter is that while having a one stop shop for anything sounds great, once a solution in a certain field gets successful the other companies trying to achive the same success will fly in like vultures and make it forever impossible to have just one service that unites everything into one neat package.
I'd give all the billionaires the same choice:
(a) Give away everything except, say, 25 million.
(b) Guillotine.
Does that include the Kelley Blue Book of my boats or are we talking purely liquid (heh) assets?
Oh, everything.
Got a $20m yacht? Sell it. Oh, youcre forced to sell it for $50k because nobody will give you more? That's just the free market, clearly it's only worth $50k.
Paid $75m to build your house? Well someone is offering you $175k and you'd better take it.
And you own a company worth $100m? No you don't, it was already taken from you and turned into a worker-owned co-op.
After all the sales and seizures, you've got $23.1m in cash, and just 1m more in the bank? OK, dude, we cool.
At that point, would you need to sell those assets? If the issue is your net worth, and your assets aren't worth much, then your net worth is low.
I sure hope Gabe goes for that or my cheeks will be red.
Only if they're underwater.
This is my problem. If the wealth stacked up real fast maybe I would crack 100 mil but man I would so do the myspace guy thing.
The Sovereign Fund for Humanity's Poor. Even if the wealth is stacking up that fast all anyone has to do is set up a trust fund with that name, the goal of using said wealth to fund every single human with a trust fund that will eliminate poverty in their life, and a board of directors that MUST contain two fiduciaries but only one from any given major Megalopolis, as well as three data analysts from OxFam. Once that's setup, all you have to do is setup automatic deposits of every single penny above $100,000,000 and every other rich person can do the same. This causes everyone to see that every other ultra rich person is just greedier than literal dragons.
well yeah if every rich person does it but keep in mind the board, fiduciaries, and data analysts are not necessarily free.
Their salaries would be baked in. They get $1,000,000 per year. This is so that each is a position that is given to the highest scoring person in Ethics that just graduated, whenever a position is available
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The enemy of progress is perfection
If he continues to be a billionaire, yes.
Amassing that level of wealth is not an accident, it's by choice.
I agree with this sentiment, but given a choice, I believe Gabe would make the right one and spend his wealth to lose billionaire status.
His supposed exploitation was not by his own design, but rather by luck - the sheer benefit of riding a privately owned and benevelontly steered surfboard on top of the waves of a collapsing capitalist society.
Basically, there's a meme about all other companies shooting themselves in the foot so Gabe always benefits, and part of that is in the way those companies fucked and manipulated their control of capital and markets. Gabe benefits just by being one of the few that can afford to participate in that system others rigged.
So he simply rigs it the least, and wins by providing the platform with the least greedy problems. Far far less than he could given his position.
IMHO, despite all controversies, Steams cut of profits from providing equal access to game visibility despite creator, nationality, background, etc, has legitimately opened the door for nearly anyone to be successful on their platform. For all the tools and services they provide, they ask for literally the smallest cut compared to any other publishing platform.
Gabe could destroy that to his benefit on a whim, and instead he over designs it to make it possible for nearly anyone to try game dev if they do the work needed to develop for them.
To hold so much capital simply for providing some form of equality to access the same in a system that overwhelming benefits others with more resources is in no way greedy imo. It's being the person with the only fire extinguisher who knows how to use it in a burning building: popular.
A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can't sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he's rolling in other assets and cash, too
Valve doesn't have stocks
It doesn't have publicly-traded shares because it's a private company, but it's still correct to say someone has stock in a private
companycorporation (which isn't relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don't stop existing just because they're not for sale to the public. It's an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it's in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.It is nitpicking, but in legal terms you could say he has shares in the company but not stocks. Stocks refers specifically to publicly traded shares, that is to say shares sold on a stock market. Shares is the more broad term as it can refer not only to stocks but also private equity units of various types. Valve is a Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, which have Membership Units as the type of shares held by owners, which differs from stocks both in terms of tax treatment and limitations on how they can be transacted.
It's nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they're publicly traded. It becomes plural when it's shares of multiple corporation.
However, LLCs aren't corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I'm in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC's shares are still considered stock, and I've been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion's been that the public/private distinction isn't the important one and I've been arguing the definition of a word that's defined differently in the relevant country.
hahahaha, what a mess.
The dispicableness of billionaires is measured by their actions not their worth. And despite being of high worth, Gabes actions are unquestionably not greedy. He's doing almost everything he can to minimize his wealth in favor of equality to access Steam as a game dev.
If he wanted to, he could charge far more than $100 to develop for them, and buy several more yachts.
But he hasn't.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
His yachts aren't indicative of his greed, but his benevolence in the face of it.
Show me a single other company the size of Valve that has chosen to forgo profit over access to something like Steam to make money yourself. That's basically non existent in the year 2025 aside from Valve. I'm not going to judge Gabe as a bad person for profiting from that. He could be profiting much much more and is choosing access for nearly everyone else instead.
Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you'll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren't also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don't realise people won't want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.
There's obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.
I see granting access for anyone to make games for Steam as a good cause.
The opportunity cost for what profit could be made by closing that is multitudes of yachts worth.
Just because you do not value this as a good cause does not mean it is not.
Does Gabe have more yachts than are needed? Yes. But again, you can't just say he's greedy because he has them. That's being incredibly biased.
Instead, how about you tell me what actions of his has made him greedy that don't involve his assets?
I can name hundreds of ways Musk should be drawn and quartered based on his actions that have nothing to do with his wealth, but rather his actual documented choices.
What choices / actions / or anything of actual greed has Gabe done that you can point to?
It's like saying anything with a swastika on it is for Nazis without realizing Hindus have been using a right oriented Swastika to represent good fortune for hundreds of years.
Gabe Newall has done the following with his 11 Billion fortune:
Co-founded "The Heart of Racing" car racing team that raises money for Children's charity.
Donates heavily to the Seattle Children's Hospital and several others around the world.
Founded Foundry10, a non profit education company that helps neuro divergent kids learn through new methods of education
Started InkFish to expand the scientific study of our oceans and is now the second highest individual donor towards marine research on the planet.
https://80.lv/articles/gabe-newell-reportedly-plans-to-invest-usd300-million-to-marine-research
That's why he has those yachts.
Same reason Hindus have their swastikas.
Their actions speak louder than the symbols they use suggest. Even when those symbols are Yachts.
He has 11 Billion. Everyone else even close to his level of market control has several magnitudes more. Why does he have so little when he owns a virtual monopoly on digital distribution?
Because he's not in it for maximizing his bank account.
The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn't mean that he's not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.
Fundamentally, I don't think we're going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there's an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it's much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he's given anything away that he wasn't legally required to means that he's not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can't be reconciled, it's not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.
The reason I've been replying at all is that some of the things you've stated to be facts are untrue, not that I'm trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.
What have I said that isn't true?
https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/billionaire-gabe-newell-oceanco-gigayacht-leviathan-1237360429/
You are just continuing to make assumptions based entirely on the assets he owns instead of his behaviour.
Something I keep pointing out, and is why I have also been responding.
I am completely on your side and feel that anyone with over a billion is an ethical and moral burden. However, I'm also wise enough to recognize that as a goal to strive towards not a destination to judge against. So I'm not going to chastise those actively working towards that goal, even if they are a billionaire.
But he loves us, no?
He could love people more distributing his billions instead of hoarding them.
If it means more cash reserves in a problematic situation for Valve, I'm up for keeping it.
If he leaves Valve, then yes
There is no such thing as a good billionaire. There are billionaires who might be temporarily aligned with you but make no mistake, none of them will love you back..
Love your wallet though
Looking at you, Mark Cuban
Valve is in a very unique spot where employees are all paid well because of the low amount of employees they have and the massive income they generate; in their employee reviews you typically don't really see low salary as a reason to leave.
He spent a billion dollars on boats.
Billionaires aren't your friends. Corporations aren't your friends.
But they can be an adversary or friendly.
Not everything is black and white.
It's just a question when we'll eat Valve
He has 6 yachts from kiddie gambling...
Which gambling websites does Valve run?
CS2, for one
How can I gamble real money in CS2 and withdraw my winnings?
I think the commenter is talking about the steam marketplace featuring a lot of CS assets which people do buy and sell for real money.
What I'm talking about is that there isn't a way to "withdraw" your money like the illegal sites let you. So no, there isn't a way to gamble through Steam.
In fact, Steam does what they have the power to do in reporting those sites and getting them taken down.
Oh sorry, I always thought there was a way to withdraw money from your steam wallet to your bank account.
I haven't used steam in a few years though, and haven't interacted with the marketplace in longer than that, so wouldn't really know!
There are third party sites where you can sell skins for money.
Idealizing billionaires is cringe. Eat them all. Just because he's not a complete asshole like all the other parasites doesn't make him a good person. He's still a parasite.
Why? He takes a 30% cut from every game sale just because his platform has a dominant grasp on gamers.
I don’t understand how people can hate taxes (which go on to pay for schools and roads) but not the way larger cut that digital storefronts charge.
There's an argument to be made that it's too high of a cut, especially these days. A lot of this money has funded great improvements to the gaming ecosystem and many open source projects. The major competing storefronts/launchers do not come even slightly close to the feature set that Steam provides, but they have tried attracting users through exclusivity deals. It's very telling that some successful competitors (like itch or gog) actually offer some unique benefits and aren't attached to some incredibly controversial corporations...
Valve isn't free from criticism and their role as a monopolist should definitely be scrutinized, especially as companies often radically change for the worse in behaviour and culture, but a lot of this critical attention was instigated by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney who can frankly gargle my nuts.
I don't want to love him. I just feel like I'd never find anyone better, if I left, you know?
Is this one of those “the ogre has fallen I love with the princess” farquaad meme situations
Probably? I'm not even the fucking princess tho?
Hey cutie. twirls hair
I hate misused taxes.
Gabe at least gives us 95% greatness back (5% being gambling)
He has an 111m superyacht, he is not giving you anything my friend, I’m sorry.
Proton, nice return policies, the best launcher, disclosure of BS like ML, other launchers, kernel level anticheat. Just a few.
Relative to his wealth? No. Relative to others? A lot.
The ability to play almost 100% of my games on my preferred OS is definitely something.
Pff, I wish my overall taxation was only 30%.
Devs can just generate keys and sell elsewhere to avoid the 30% cut.
Look, he can be a rich guy and a leader. 1 billion is a decent line in the sand of "sorry, you own too much". He's certainly not as nakedly evil as most the rest of his ilk.
I usually put it at $10M, and there are specific arguments for this.
The Trinity Study used a standard retirement portfolio and then studied its results using a sliding window starting from 1925. Let's say you retire at 60 and expect to have another 20 years of life. This time period covers good stock market performance and bad, high inflation and low. It's a very robust result, and the US and even worldwide economy would have to fundamentally change for it to be invalidated. (You could argue that Trump is driving things in that direction, but that's a whole other discussion.)
How much of the portfolio can you withdraw each year and be safe?
The study starts with a percentage withdraw rate, which is increased by the rate of inflation each year. It then checks if the portfolio would have run out of money before the person is expected to die. This resulted in the 4% rule where you start withdrawing 4% the first year and then increase by inflation. It's extremely unlikely that you'll run out of money in a standard retirement period.
If you withdraw 3% or 2%, you won't run out of money even if you live forever.
So let's take a 2.5% withdraw rate. This is extremely conservative and should basically last forever. US government bond rates are typically higher than that (but not always), so we're not even that tied to the stock market on this one. If you had $10M, take 2.5% the first year and increase by inflation each year after, you would perpetually have the purchasing power of $250k/year.
If you have $250k/year, you can live very comfortably anywhere on Earth. This is the part where someone always chimes in "what about the Bay area or New York?"
First, with this plan, you can live anywhere. You're not tied to an area by a job. Maybe don't chose high cost of living areas.
OK, let's say there's family or something else that's specifically tying you to those areas. Median income in Manhattan is $106k, and the other burrows are significantly lower. San Fransisco median is $136k. I'm quite certain you can live comfortably on $250k in those areas if you absolutely had to for some reason.
Also, don't forget that unlike all us working stiffs, you wouldn't have to put another dime into a 401k or any other retirement plan. Your $10M already covers that. Feel free to spend it all on luxuries.
So that's the limit. We can increase the $10M based on future inflation, but higher than that is just wanking about how much you have, and there's no reason society should respect that.
That's really well thought out. Thank you for that.
I can agree with that. Still, has he ever been naked that you know of? Cuz... I'd like to really solidify my stance...?
There's Steam Marketplace and loot boxes that stain his image for negatives. He could've not done that had had one less mega yacht.
That's real life for you, with all those pesky shades of grey
You're saying Gabe's a pleasure dom, if I'm picking up what you're putting down?
Considering the role of steam, yeah if you squint at it right
Being a billionaire is immoral in all cases
FINE.
How does it work with someone like Taylor Swift, who According to Forbes, Swift is the first musician to reach 10-figure status solely based on songwriting and performances rather than brand deals, makeup lines, or business ventures?
You can argue they should be more charitable, but that really can't be required. You could also say taxes should be higher past a certain point, but they currently aren't and that's not any individual's fault.
Also, I'm using Taylor swift as an example, but I mean more generally a person that captures worldwide attention for their art.
I believe a moral person would not horde such obscene wealth while people are struggling and starving unnecessarily. Were not talking about just being "well off" - It's more money than a person could need in countless lifetimes. So yes, I think she should be charitable. Edit: Or taxed.
In my opinion if anyone has billions of dollars and hasn't given a majority of it away to charity or those in need, that person is on some level at least somewhat an evil person.
Sure, much of it would be tied up in stocks and stuff that legally can't be sold for specific purposes or timeframes, but if you have net worth in the billions and any stocks that could be sold for cash and then donated it should be. Or if you have an annual income that's much more than you need to live an extremely comfortable life and then you just spend and invest the excess instead of donate.
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments transferred to the IRS annually, to be auctioned slowly over time. The first $10 million held by a natural person may be exempted from this requirement. No exemptions for artificial "persons".
If I am not mistaken, Steam is one of the highest paid companies in the world, if not the. Perhaps still not fair relative to contribution, yet exemplary compared to the rest.
I do believe that Gabe is one of the better/more benevolent winners of an inherently unfair and now definitely broken system.
That means that gamers have been ripped off for decades.
Valve encourages and keeps the system broken just as much as Microsoft or Nintendo does. They all try really hard not to compete.
They do have high salaries, but it's also a ridiculously small company for the money they make. Gaben is still making money hand over fist, and the employees making big money are all on the admin team.
Steam could charge a 5% fee and give the rest to developers. The services and salaries would still stay the same. It would give Gaben enough money to cover his billion dollar boats fleets maintenance cost, just not enough to buy himself a new yacht every two years.
steam charges the industry standard...if they lowered it, and their market share naturally increased even further they would be even more open to some kind of anti-monopoly lawsuit (which are very often put forward by less effective companies, who just want the monopoly themselves. ie. Epic)
Every company in a soft monopoly charges the industry standard, that is how soft monopolies work.
They all stop charging what it's worth and pick a number together that equals maximum profits.
No, they wouldn't.
Anti-trust law exists to prevent companies from overcharging consumers, something they can do when they don't have competition.
Valve keeping their prices far higher than costs is something that can open them up to anti-trust scrutiny. Competitively lowering their prices while still maintaining profitability cannot, as that is the exact goal of anti-trust laws in the first place.
It's also fucking wild that gamers hate Tim Sweeney so much. What has he used his fortune to do? Build a reasonably priced and powerful third party game engine that makes it easy for indie developers to build games, spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to break up Apple and Google's walled garden 30% bullshit, launched a PC store to try and do the same with Steam, and bought tens of thousands of acres of US land to preserve for nature conservation. Oh what a moustache twirling monster!
look into the history of anti-trust laws actual application across US history, just like everything else around our government...it's a tool for whoever holds power to either ratfuck funds or otherwise manipulate markets, for personal gain/at the direction of some other company.
sweeney is on record as saying he just wants the monopoly for himself, and engages in far more manipulative/anticonsumer behavior than steam does, like buying exclusivity deals
some monopolies form because all the competition is just incompetent
It doesn't matter how the monopoly forms, Gaben is still one of the rat fucks profiting from it. He wouldn't have been able to spend a billion dollars on boats if he wasn't.
Whatever arguments you think you have, ask yourself first if they apply to Musk or Bezos. They probably do.
A billionaire who gives away 99% of their wealth to the poorest, first and exclusively, isn't a billionaire, and still has enough money (maybe more!) for the rest of time.
Not off you have a fleet of yachts
He's just another fat dragon who got rich exploiting people through ownership of capital.
Then he got children hooked on gambling because one billion wasn't enough.
He deserves to be locked up like the rest of them.
He is not fa... he is definitely not a dragon!
Offer him the option to transition Valve to a workers cooperative. Boom, he would no longer be a billionaire.
He has that option every day.
This is really simple. If you have more than a 1000 million dollars. Every day you decide to keep it instead of saving lives and helping people. It will never be moral
"Billionaire" is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be "millionaire". The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It's just inflation.
Plus, a lot of "billionaires" are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It's a "theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that".
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don't expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
Valve in particular in a private company, so if Gabe own billions in shares, it's not Valve shares
In order to be incorporated, a company has to have stock. Private companies still have shares even if they aren't traded on public exchanges.
It's possible that Gabe owns 100% of Valve's stock, but it's also possible that he's sold some to other people or entities. Originally when Valve was founded, it was a split between Gabe and Mike Harrington, but Harrington reportedly sold his shares to Gabe when he left.
It's also very likely that Gabe owns shares in other corporations, even just as personal retirement investments. But that's not what I was talking about.
ah alright, thanks for the explainer
Take all of his assets, let him live. Then take all of his assets again 5 years later
since he would have gotten rich again by the right people attracting wealth obviously
Fuck him too
That's what I'm saying: how do I make this happen!?
Maybe a few dates to wine and dine him?
He can buy his freedom by using his wealth to finally release hl3
Only if he gives up his power and privilege permanently
To whom!?
The working class
It could be amazing if Steam gets converted to a worker cooperative.
Like most worker cooperatives, it probably wouldn't last a year.
He's low on the list for sure
We can save him for desert.
If it were to be a revolution he would be given the chance. Just be a director of valve for a normal director salary. If he take it then he would be just another worker.
We don't have to eat them all, but we do have to take their money.
Valve makes tonnes of money from loot boxes or whatever they’re called. Basically a form of gambling.
It also just so happens that a great way of making a shit load of money is making it super easy for people to buy from you. Valves big competitive advantage is just… not fucking that up. A surprising number of companies fuck that up.
And as someone else said, Gabe doesn’t have to be a billionaire. He could use his phenomenal wealth to build hospitals and help the poor, rather than building his own little private navy.
Valve is doing a lot that will make people like them, but they’re still a huge corporation, and Gabe is still a billionaire.
I'm not eating Elon Musk. That's like dumpster diving behind a cracker barrel.
The fattest pigs make the crispiest bacon.
I personally don't like the idea of murder, I'd if we-the-people get into power, just pass laws that taxes them, then enforce the law as such. If they resist, jailtime for tax evasion.
For those that are exceedingly cruel with their time as a billionaire, they get tried, judged by a jury of average people, 2/3 is a conviction (as opposed to the unanimity required now), life imprisonment.
Billionaires and their heirs are deprived of political rights.
Easy peaceful transition. Zero bloodshed
I don't like bloodshed, because once that starts, once we "okay" mob killings, people are gonna attack anyone they don't like, including small bussiness owners they had a grudge against in the past.
I have empathy, I don't wanna see the streets filled with blood.
Yeah I don't think we can force billionaires to do anything without some violence. Have you seen the world and how long the rich have been in power?
If one bad apple truly should the bunch, yes. Yes you have to eat him too
We can give him the honor of being eaten last.
It'll give him time to stop being a billionaire before it's too late.
We shouldn't eat them. I don't want prion disease.
Sorry, but they must all be eaten. There should be no billionaires.
ABAB. All billionaires are bad.
There's a real easy way for him to not be eaten. Make sure he has no more than $999, 999,999 in his pocket when we get there
But that's haaaaard.
You guys are much less understanding than I expected. Bleeding hearts, my ass...
Bleeding hearts always clot surprisingly fast when it comes to those they don't like.
Do we get to keep his boats?
He has at least 6. Maybe we can get HL3 if we say we want it to take place entirely on a giant yacht... 🤔
Okay, I hear you. But if you were a billionaire, wouldn't YOU buy six boats? PLEASE try to lie and claim otherwise.
The fuck would I or anyone for that matter do with more than 1 boat? Honestly?
Play the XL version of Battleship™.
Well, you'd have SIX boats. So 6x as much of whatever boat stuff you imagine, I guess.
oh yeah. I like the boat stuff.
Unless you want to live on a yacht, I could see owning 0-1 and just chartering ships when I feel like it
Do spaceships count as boats?
It's a "ship," I'd say it counts.
Yeah, it's right there in the name. So 5 boats and 1 spaceship MIGHT be okay, that's apparently what I believe tonight.
Is that boats inside of boats or completely seperate. I can't see ore than 3. Spare boat and emergency boat in the off chance both are down.
As far as I know Valve isn't one of those companies that employes a hundred thousand minimum-wage slaves, but one that's gotten big, by actually innovating, which is like the only potentially good aspect of capitalism and seems to not be something most corporations do anymore. Of course were this question to ever become relevant he would have to give up most of his wealth, but it's not like he is one of those billionaires that eat babies for breakfast.
The worst thing he does that we know of seems to be trying to collect the fastest iteration of every type of vehicle.
Well no. Valve is involved in a lot of actual gambling with csgo etc. How they are ignoring and willfully profiting from all of the skin casinos etc. is my biggest problem with them. Despite that they are still one of the best big companies i know of.
They allow gambling clutches pearls next you'll tell me they don't drug test their employees!
And they purposely target kids with addictive loot crate mechanics and look the otherway while loot/skins are sold on 3rd party sites.
Maybe GabeN really needs a 7th yacht but maybe he's just a greedy bastard who wants all the money.
Same bullshit people use to ban things "for the children" counter strike is not targeted at children, why should Valve prevent people from selling their skins on 3rd party sites?
Freedom is bad because children? Porn should be banned because children, flavored cigs should be banned because children, flavored alcohol should be banned because children.
Such a stupid argument
Edit: To be clear, I don't like lootboxes and do not play games that use them, I also am not a fan of alcohol or cigs and acknowledge they cause harm, however I see it as a freedom issue, just because I don't like it doesn't mean I should decide what others can do with their body within reason. "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins" children are just an excuse to censor things that parents can't be bothered to stop themselves.
I understand and don't necessarily disagree with any of that but let's not pretend GabeN is anything other than another greedy billionaire.
His actions seem to indicate he is in fact not the same as other billionaires
And collusion with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
He charges 30% like the rest of them, he isn't trying to compete.
Valve innovated a package manager, a store, strict DRM, and gambling / third party cosmetic markets.
Very recently they built the Proton compatibility layer.
Valve gives you a taste of gambling.
Every billionaire out there has become a billionaire by being a fucking idiot. No exceptions.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-profit-per-head-from-steam-commissions-is-out-there-and-at-usd3-5-million-per-employee-it-makes-apple-and-facebook-look-like-a-lemonade-stand/
Give him the ability to divest his wealth first.
He has the ability right now.
Doesn't really count if you're only doing it once people threaten you with murder.
I'll let the normies keep swift if we can keep gabe
They are both part of the problem.
Just universal wealth redistribution, there is no way a human may ever deserve to accumulate so many resources...
In ten years people will talking about the GabeCube killing PC modularity like they always saw it coming
Gabe and Swift are not obligate billionaires. They both have the capacity to adjust their wealth to avoid the cutoff.
I obviously should've posted this to unpopularopinions. Still, you guys need to really slow down and enjoy your showers more, JESUS.
There is a finite amount of money in this world. For one person to have more means others have less. There is no going around that simple fact.
8 people now have more than 53% of the world combined.
Not really... that's kind of the whole point of fiat currencies, you can always mint more.
Most billionaires don't even have any money. At that level they don't need it. They don't pay for things. They just get loans they'll never pay back, with older loans as collateral.
The problem with billionaires isn't money (though billionaires are one of the main problems with money). The problem with billionaires is that their fiat, virtual, wealth gives them an unfair amount of influence over everyone else's lives, and that they alone get to enjoy a living standard (being able to get all your necessities and live a fulfilling life essentially for free) that should (and could, with an adequate distribution of resources) be available to everyone.
Let's say there are 100 tables in the world. If one person has 50 tables then it means everyone else has less. If mister tables aquires an additional table, can we agree it is coming from someone else ? Someone poorer. Even if the governement can make a new table to replace it, the fact that mr table is sucking up all tables on the market is still a problem for every one else.
You say they don't have money, but if they live well, buy everything they want and influence the world as they see fit, I feel it's disingenuous to say they don't actually have money. They're certainly sucking up your tables.
I'm going on a tangeant here, but it's exactly why you don't want your government to be cash positive. A government in the green is taking that money from someplace. A government in the red is actually helping everyone else not drown. It's all a matter of where that money is going. That explains why the vast majority of countries run in the red. A government paying it's own debt is the same as deleting money from the economy.
I do agree with your general sentiment though.
I want to say that Gabe is a good guy, because he's a gamer like many of us, and because Valve is so pro-consumer, and because supposedly the company is mostly rid of hierarchy, but he's still a billionaire unfortunately.
Gabe's fleet of yatchs is worth about 1 billion (6 boats and a sub or two). The yearly maintenance cost is estimated to be between 100 to 150 million per year. He essentially taxes a whole industry and most gamers because the soft monopoly and collusion he has going on with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo let's him.
This is literally the definition of boot licking. Please try to think farther then the line his marketing team draws for you.
no
:(
Love cool ideas not companies and the CEOs that figurehead them!
Why eat them? You better turn them to compost, so they can actually help something grow.
Gabe is not the enemy
A billionaire is a billionaire. 🤷♂️
Name some things that make Gabe a bad guy.
He's not gonna give you a million dollars or a big wet kiss on the mouth dude, you can stop sticking up for the big nerd. He's a billionaire and chooses to continue being a billionaire - that is a BIG thing that makes him a bad person.
I'm not sticking up for anyone.. just commenting on the frequent shitty attitude people have around here.
A shitty attitude, or an honest recognition of a massively unequal wealth distribution seeing very few very selfish people at the top hoard gigantic sums of money seemingly with the goal to just get more money, while so many of us struggle to get by working one, two, three jobs?
Because I'll agree, there's a lot of very pouty people on here that will bang on and moan endlessly about absolute bullshit. The insanity that one person can accumulate a billion dollars though? That's not bullshit. That's something to moan about.
Sadly, he is. This is what the enemy looks like. It is simply not possible to ethically acquire even a tenth of the wealth that he hoards for himself. The damage he has caused in acquiring and retaining that wealth is far greater than his net worth.
The sooner he starts his redemption arc, the better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-0lAhnoDlU
See, the thing is, once you eat the one percent, the bottom eighty percent want to eat.The top twenty percent and the bottom seventy percent want to eat.The top thirty percent.And then we just become the human centipede
Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.
Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.
Now, the world's children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.
Enjoy your grovelling, I hear there's cake!
Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read Wretched of the Earth. Read The Revolution Betrayed. Read Kronstadt 1921.
Enjoy your Blanqism and Bonapartism
"When education is not liberating it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor"
heheh
Honestly you shouldn't judge anyone as a group, even billionaires. They are not all evil, probably mostly evil though even if just in the basic sense of destroying the world for profit, both physically and in terms of human happiness.
The time we spent the past 20 years fighting surveillance, private political funding, and proprietary systems will never be given back to us. That is something more valuable than money that the billionaires have collectively taken from us. When we do finally get our rights and humanity reinstated properly, that will be a lot of near wasted time for millions of people. Gave was one of the good ones. He had principles no matter how much money he had which is commendable. I consider Bill Gates to be one of the good billionaires too. Windows wasn't really bad until he left the company.
since the game news shelf ui update he really does deserve to be eaten