Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
Offer him the option to transition Valve to a workers cooperative. Boom, he would no longer be 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…
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.
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?
I have no problem with people who contribute a lot of value to society being proportionally rewarded. However, having a net worth in the billions is just plain ludicrous, especially since the billionaires aren’t the ones creating all the value, they’re just controlling it. For example, did Gabe invent everything that makes Valve as successful as it is, or was most of it designed and developed by engineers who are paid a fraction of what he is paid? Even if most of Valve’s IP started with Gabe and other engineers were doing the grunt work to “make it so”, that still shouldn’t mean that society allows this one man to control billions worth of our societal resources.
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)
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.
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.
We don’t have to eat them all, but we do have to take their money.
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/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.
Valve innovated a package manager, a store, strict DRM, and gambling / third party cosmetic markets.
Very recently they built the Proton compatibility layer.
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.
And collusion with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
He charges 30% like the rest of them, he isn’t trying to compete.
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
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.
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
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:
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Co-founded “The Heart of Racing” car racing team that raises money for Children’s charity.
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Donates heavily to the Seattle Children’s Hospital and several others around the world.
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Founded Foundry10, a non profit education company that helps neuro divergent kids learn through new methods of education
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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/
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 while still being a billionaire.
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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 company 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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!
I’d make 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
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
