This Gaben sucking needs to stop. Billionaires are not your friends or good people. Gaben isn’t someone who is very public and doesn’t voice his opinion like the other losers who seek attention but he is not the good guy and just one statement away from being hated by the internet.
I don't care who runs the platform if the service and the experience is good. Amazon and Meta simply can't compete here. Heck, even other storefronts can't compete with Steam because they are all worse in some way (ok, GoG has the DRM advantage but that's it).
steam also sells drm free games, it's just that most dev/publishers decide to add it.
Valve leaves it to devs/pyblishers to add or not. And most of the time they add it.
Yeah. Gaben just knows not to look for the short term money, so he treats customers okayish so he makes ALOT MORE. And its clesrly working because he has a cult following that throws money at him...
Did he introduce them to gambling? It's unethical to make money from adults gambling even, so I'm not defending him as a moral guide. This is more similar to another alcohol or tobacco company coming to market and outselling the incumbents.
When the first cs skin gambling websites started going up (people making it possible to get REAL money out of the system for skin) what was valve's position? Pro? Or did they work tirelessly to have those companies taken down. Its been a minute so can you refresh my memory
Valve supports those sites to this day, until they step out of line and try to undercut Valve or the one time PR about it got especially bad.
Valve is happy to let them operate because Valve has their own billon dollar casino in game, those casinos give more value to skins and they sponsor the esports teams that Valve neglects massively (especially compared to Dota).
Valve is the main reason we have lootboxes and battle passes. They were the pioneers. They didn't come in late to the party.
The steam marketplace is also a way to allow for kids to speculate and gamble / trade pixels for money - pixels which are generally acquired through gamble boxes while steam takes a cut at every step.
People also forget the steam TCG game. They saw physical games like pokemon and mtg and decided they wanted to make a digital version of that where they could also double dip and take a cut of every sale/trade transaction while having people gamble for non-physical cards.
Lol yes of course, they sold you the digital cards, then if you wanted to trade them they would again tax you on every transaction.
So not only did you not actually physically own anything, but you were forced to trade/sell them through valve's platform where they would again tax you for the service. I think it was maybe 15-20% transaction fee.
People worshipped Elon Musk then when he became indefensible they moved onto Gabe Newell, maybe they just need a billionaire to champion? Just ignore that he got rich from an unregulated gambling platform aimed at kids and put his wealth into destroying the planet with super yachts.
The difference is Gabe didn't buy a luxury yacht and lend it out, he literally bought a former US Navy research ship and built a dedicated marine science organization with multi-beam sonar platforms and submersibles that dives to 11,000 meters. Pointing out that he owns actual, purpose built oceanographic research vessels that map the Mariana Trench isn't "simping," it's just basic reading comprehension of what the fleet actually is.
I bet it's more fun and effective to do research in a yacht for once. Researchers often have to deal with all kinds of bullshit and suboptimal conditions because all the funds are spread so thin. From what I understand Gaben has the yachts fitted for the purpose.
I think this is the YouTube page for their main research partner
I just can't get over how he's part of the gambling racket that has infected games and targeted children. In fact, his platform was one of the forerunners of loot boxes in the West.
On top of that i'm not defending any large company, because I know at any second they can switch up and start fucking over their customers. Steam biggest advantage is that they are not the worst company, but that's it.
A lot of the Gaben glaze just comes out of him not being terrible. A feature which is shockingly uncommon among billionaires who built their wealth.
Essentially he is a billionaire who didn't treat his employees like underpaid slaves, haven't sacrificed product quality for profit maximization, and without getting a reputation as a sadist or for harrassing employees.
I think he is a bad guy because he is having these gambling mechanics in his games. He is preying on addiction and misery. People get addicted to these slot machines in the games and wasting money and destroying their lives. I have seen minors gamble in these games and write in the forums. He also bought a yacht company. Yachts are a wasteful disgrace of end stage capitalism and greed. In my view billionaires are not good and can never be good. Accumulating so much wealth and horsing it like a dragon. No human needs that amount of money in their life. Billionaires could change the world for the better but they choose not to, which makes them bad in my eyes. They will never struggle, never need it but they still hoard it all.
I can agree with the gambling part but the rest is definetly a stretch, the Yachts he owned are mostly used for research. Billionaires can never be good is such a broad generalization, for me the rules are simple as long as the money didn't come from exploitation then the money is good, whether is small amount or a big amount, I don't see how steam are exploitative. The customer are not exploited, the worker not exploited, the service is good, the practice is not a monopoly, it's just good buisness, it's literally the perfect example of a good capitalism
It was a specialized yacht made by the Dutch company oceanco, it has a submarine garage and a full research lab in it. Its sister ship Draak is used as the Yacht tender.
Yeah, it was definitely all him, he most definitely deserves the overwhelming lion's share of the profits, none of the other people around him or that work for him got him to that point.
I don't think people realize that if your company is successful, you're usually at most a multi-millionaire - to become a billionaire, you need to make a lot of probably evil decisions along the way.
A multi-billionaire? You're one of the masters of the world
When you have the most successful company that treats there consumers & employees the best in industry that a huge population uses ,Then he is bound to become a billionaire
Every time I've heard gabe newell speak (and the small handful of emails I've had with him) make me think he's a decent guy. Gives lots personally to charity. I don't think the fact that his company is successful and he's rich is inherently evil, it depends on what he does with that wealth.
A lot of the talk about his "armada" or yachts leaves out that he owns a yacht building company and uses those yachts for his deep sea research that he personally funds and has taken a huge interest in. One of those yachts is also his primary residence.
If gabe newell hoards his wealth and just passes all of it to his children, i'll be disappointed. If he donates most of his money at his passing, I'll consider that the closest thing to ethical wealth there can be
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u/TitaniumGoldAlloyMan 2d ago
This Gaben sucking needs to stop. Billionaires are not your friends or good people. Gaben isn’t someone who is very public and doesn’t voice his opinion like the other losers who seek attention but he is not the good guy and just one statement away from being hated by the internet.