Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The worst thing he does that we know of seems to be trying to collect the fastest iteration of every type of vehicle.
And collusion with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
He charges 30% like the rest of them, he isn’t trying to compete.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
