Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
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.
We don’t have to eat them all, but we do have to take their money.
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.
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/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
Valve doesn’t have stocks
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.
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.
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.
Devs can just generate keys and sell elsewhere to avoid the 30% cut.
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
Pff, I wish my overall taxation was only 30%.
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.
The ability to play almost 100% of my games on my preferred OS is definitely something.
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.
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
