Tbf, compared to most modern CEOs, Gabe Newell is a saint. I suppose in a different world where we aren’t in the second gilded age, he might be more hated
Valve certainly isn’t perfect, and I used to buy more games on GOG. But then I noticed those games, which initially had Linux support, were no longer getting updated or working properly on distros. Their Linux support just kind of fizzled out.
On the flipside, even in it’s early days, Steam/Proton made Linux gaming such a far nicer experience. If Proton were proprietary, I would stay away from Steam still. But what Valve is doing for Linux and free and open-source software is a net good right now, and that is worth supporting.
There are things that suck about Steam, like the drm. Just the other day I had a game running and also tried to run a second game through GameNative only to find Steam only allows me to run one game at a time, dumb. And there will probably be a day when Valve pulls some kind of enshittified bait and switch like Google is doing with Android right now.
And when that day comes it will be necessary to fork and forget them. But until then I’ll enjoy the ride.
Technically they only block the second game launch if both are online. If you switch steam to offline mode, you can launch as many games as you want.
That’s slightly better, but the salient question is, how would these things function in system that overall is more rights respecting and built on free software principles? It’s still an anti-feature, it’s still drm, and it’s still a component of a part of Steam that is proprietary.
While Steam is doing a lot of good, it can’t be forgotten that the majority of their systems are still not free software, and still fall far short of a more ideal platform.
What’d be really nice to see is maybe something like Bazaar but with a gaming focus. A much more open storefront that can still allow game devs to be compensated for their work.
Gaben is the only capitalists I simp for. He’s what capitalism is supposed to be, not what it actually is.
Steam is actually a good product compared to meta google amazon etc. My only real gripe with how valve conducts business is encouraging under age gambling through skins and profiting off it.
It shows how low the bar is. We can eat him last.
do NOT let this guy lead the revolution
Leave gabe alone. Leave him alooonee.
One of these days you’re gonna read about how he has kids tied up in his basement and then your whole worldview will fall apart. That’s the day society crumbles.
Gabe worshipping is cringe. he’s a dude. have some self respect.
capitalist. he’s not a dude.
Guillotine ALL billionaires
Is this just blind zeal for dogma, or do you have any scrap of justification to mob justice this guy? To be blunt, I can point to evils that Gabe is responsible for, and if you can cite one, I’ll support ya - but if you’re oversimplifying “rich = evil” because it’s a convenient and fun, than you’re as evil as those you’d behead.
In the wake of the French revolution many good people died for the crime of being distantly related to a noble. After we murder a few billionaires, can we take their money and make a gift of it - we could then gift billions of dollars to anyone we don’t like and murder them for being a billionaire! It’s a perfect system! </s>
Yes. Gabe is rich - but honestly their behavior is by and large the practical example by which other billionaires are condemned. If all billionaires were as responsible as Gabe, society would be much less inclined to grab their pitchforks in the first place - we’d still have a broken system that needs fixing, but without gaudily selfish billionaires I’d be optimistic that it could be fixed without bloodshed.
Im not sure its smart to reply to this st all ley alone right as i wake up but ill bite.
First off. It is fundamentally immoral to have such wealth. Last i looked the conservative estimate to end homelessness in the us was like $10b. Gabe newell alone could do that and then he and his lineage could still live in excessive insane luxury with no issues for generations.
Secondly, you can NOT obtain such wealth without abusing others. At best, youre just not paying a fair share. No single person can do so much work or is so uniquely gifted or whatever else capitalism would have you believe. Not even remotely close.
Third. Fuck his predatory gambling that feeds off the addicts and kids
All rich people are evil, it’s obvious. If you end up with a lot of money and you’re somehow not evil, you’ll give it away instead of becoming rich.
I don’t believe you. I believe you’re earnest, I just also believe you’re wrong. If you grew up in a modern industrialized nation with luxuries like plumbing, sub millimeter precision engineering, electricity, internet - are you suggesting we tear those things down because others don’t have access to them? 'Cause if no, I have news for ya, buddy - by the standards of history, you’re exceedingly rich. You wouldn’t understand though because all rich people are evil, obviously. 🙄
There’s a difference to having plumbing and having useless shit like holiday houses, private swimming pools, luxury cars, gold tat etc. And a multi-millionaire like Gabe Newell can even buy all of that and still have a lot of spare money to pay off anyone for any reason. Why would any single person be entitled to that?
They shouldn’t, but Mr. Newell didn’t invent capitalism. I blame coffee and the enlightenment for that. And for all the flaws it brings, it’s still a step up from feudalism.
Valve found a niche in the gaming industry. Gabe created a good product and stewarded it well. He has an industry gold standard stance on piracy and for as much he has made Valve’s product indispensably useful, their product fosters indie developers and small creators in ways the competition struggles to play catch-up on. By biggest frustration with the guy is largely about worrying about what happens when he steps down and is replaced by someone else.
For all this, the system has showered him with money. A frankly stupid amount of money. And for that, you assert he should die. Do you think if we Thanos snap away all the billionaires that the system which creates them will automatically go with them? If it does are you naïve enough to think that it would easily be replaced by something better in the power vacuum that follows?
The bottom line is: there’s no shortage of billionaires who deserve a good pruning. Plenty of uncontroversial targets whose absence would send a clear message. Choosing Gabe Newell as a target of convenience does far more damage than help. I’m not saying don’t murder monsters, I’m saying don’t let bloodlust lead you to shooting yourself in the foot.
he just happens to run a business that is beloved by its customers and that fact is not lost on him
Gabe doesn’t do a lot of interviews and mostly keeps out of the public eye. Elon Musk also had a lot of fans until he started running his mouth too much and revealing who he really is.
We already know a bit about Valve’s internal culture due to leaks and interviews, and it’s dysfunctional but in a completely different way from almost every other company.
Thanks to having a small headcount plus more money than God, Valve has zero (internal) pressure to release, and has embraced a culture of freedom where developers can work on whatever they want. This has led to tons of Valve projects getting 80% finished before being abandoned once they reach the final stages of development and are no longer fun to work on. Every release they’ve managed since Steam took off has been due to a few major players with the charisma to swing others to join their pet projects and stay for the long haul.
In a rarity for the field, I’m not aware of any toxicity issues in Valve’s workplace or a single complaint about Gabe himself. Those who’ve quit have nearly always said it’s because their passion project got canned due to it being so hard to get anything past the finish line. Other than that, employees seem to love working there (the massive paycheck probably helps too).
Gabe seems to be held in high regard, even though the internal structure he’s cultivated is such a mess. And I still prefer this clusterfuck of inefficiency to literally any other AAA developer.
I will accuse Gabe of being a piece of shit once he does something that makes him a piece of shit. He has yet to do so. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this.
tbh i feel indifferent towards billionaires/CEOS,unless they treat their employees like shit or inshitify the company .
He isn’t perfect but he represents what could work about capitalism if there were proper safeguards. With him, he’s governed by his own choices or morals, so the current system doesn’t work because most rich people don’t care. Gabe:
Provides a good base product
The product is based on being ran on open hardware that you own.
Uses his own money to advance support for a true open standard (Linux) because Windows is going down the toilet for UX.
Creates his own hardware that works with the product to give a walled garden experience if you want that. Or you can install your own operating system on the hardware, or install his operating system on other hardware, he doesn’t care.
Doesn’t have anticompetitive practices with people that make a similar product, focusing on being the best product.
Incorporates ease of use for other products into his product (PlayStation controllers, adding non steam games that are able to use most of the same features via Steam including Proton).
Treats employees well.
Is generous with the refund policy.
And guess what? Everyone is happy. He’s happy and rich AF, his employees are happy, his customers are happy, his competition is happy because he’s not purposefully throttling them (though they probably aren’t happy he’s eating their lunch because customers don’t want them). The system can work for everyone if it is fair. We just need to demand these safeguards because even Gabe could change his mind at any time.
100% ^^ this right here.
Valve is one of the very few big companies I am totally fine spending money with. The value proposition is entirely focused on the products and how the customer, me, gets the most from them. No artificial scarcity, no protectionist bullshit, no outrageously exploitative EULA or obvious shafting of vendors. They focused on creating something useful and functional, and they profit from it. Bravo.
And they have been doing this for decades. The first PC I installed Steam on was a Celeron with a Voodoo2 GPU in it.
I have to do business with other companies because they have driven other competitors out of business. I get to do business with Valve.
He’s a billionaire. There are no good ones. Some are worse than others, but none are good. It’s a disgusting amount of hoarded wealth.
I think you’re missing the point. The meme implies that liking Steam is some kind of contradiction to being anticapitalist (or at least anti-status quo of ridiculous unchecked capitalism). It’s not a contradiction because the way Gabe runs his business is good. It is the way all businesses should be ran: pro consumer, pro employee, pro competition/pro free market, and not caught up in the gambling fiasco that is the stock market. If other businesses were not so focused on fucking over as many people as possible, they could be just as successful as Gabe.
Should it be POSSIBLE to be that successful? You don’t think so, and I tend to agree. But pulling for a 90% tax rate after a certain point is in no way in opposition to praising fair business practices. They’re directly related.
If Steam becomes an awful experience, guess what? I won’t sing its praises to people I know and I’ll find something better. Loyalty goes both ways.
But pulling for a 90% tax rate after a certain point is in no way in opposition to praising fair business practices. They’re directly related.
Back in the times that people keep telling me were great, that was the norm. Cutting taxes for the money makers is the entire reason we’re in this mess. Instead of reinvesting money in the company or the country, it’s being boarded and sat on to make number go up.
You are correct.
It’s not a contradiction because the way Gabe runs his business is good.
It… Very much is. He runs a business that doesn’t make people piss in bottles. Great, but that’s a low bar.
He runs a business that looks after customers, that’s great but Amazon does that too so I consider it a cost of doing the billions in trade that he does and a cost of effective monopoly maintenance. If they weren’t pro consumer folks might actually leave.
He pays his employees better than others, great, but he’s sitting on 9 billion in wealth so let’s not pretend he couldn’t pay them more or squeeze small developers less than 30% (and he’s probably squeezing them more than big houses).
You can’t have that much money and be ethical. You can be less shitty than other billionaires but again that’s a low, low bar.
but Amazon [looks after customers] too
This is news to me
Amazon customer service has been “good.” Any time theres an issue they just ship a new one and tell you to keep the old one. I know lots of people who speak extremely highly of them, do you think they got so big treating their paying customers like shit?
Wait you’re telling me the guy that pioneered loot crates and owns like 8 yachts isn’t a good person?
But he made that fun game that one time!
GabeN is a CEO, rich, probably greedy and has a yacht, but by all accounts he isn’t a douchebag.
I don’t simp for him, but he is different from most other billionaires in that he got rich doing what he loves and just kept doing it, and has kept his company on course on a mission that is, all things considered, pretty good for everyone involved (insofar a for-profit company is capable of such a thing).
He loves his yacht so much that he bought the yacht company.
Pretty sure its to churn out research vessels for science though.
yacht makers hate this one simple trick.
His platform supports and allows a lot of gambling and turns a blind eye to children being sucked into their trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
Quit simping for billionaires, fucking morons.
They have, since that post was made, banned skin gambling sponsors from being featured at all CS2 and Dota events: https://www.strafe.com/news/read/valve-bans-skin-gambling-sponsors-from-all-cs2-events/
They get points for correcting, but not enough to warrant praise.
“We’ve been promoting gambling to children for years, and not a single one of us thought that was bad until a Youtuber with a large following pointed that out to us. So we stopped.”
Should be read
“Someone with the reach to hurt our bottom line spoke up”
Sure man, insult them that’ll get me on your side, you dick
Yup. I don’t disagree with their point but then they had to be dick about it and now I hope they get an itch in a hard to reach spot on their back.
Quit simping for billionaires, fucking morons.
If you read their comment and still thought they were doing that, you’re the problem here.
I don’t simp for him, but he is different
Yeah, no. Just saying “I don’t …” and then singing their praises is exactly what a simp does.
This is what right wingers have been doing validate themselves forever.
“I don’t like Trump, but …an essay on why he’s so great…”
“he’s different” is not praise and it damn sure isn’t “singing” it. And comparing this to the trump situation is just braindead. They literally say he’s sent from God.
that he got rich doing what he loves
What he loved doing was taking away consumer rights and pocketing the profit as the one who did it the best. Before Steam, you actually owned your games and could resell them without asking anyone permission. Steam bypassed all copyright laws by saying, “But what if we sold a steam key instead of the game.” It’s the same “It’s not illegal if we do it on a computer” law sidestep that techbros learned from Gabe and copied.
Before Apple sold restricted ownership music and before Amazon sold restricted ownership books, their was Steam paving the way to our current economy where you own nothing.
Steam was launched in 2003.
By that point the ships had already sailed. You didn’t own software, and micro transactions already existed. Steam did not “bypass” copyright laws- the facilitated a storefront that sold based on already established and litigated law.
This goes back tk the 1960’s with the origin of computers, when they were gigantic. Manufacturers like IBM would lease the hardware to institutions that used it, and the software was just included for free. This practice ended because of antitrust lawsuits in 1969, which led to IBM charging for software seperstely.
It’s funny you mentioned Apple, because one of the foundational cases of software copyright law was 1983’s Apple vs Franklin case that ruled against a company making Apple II clones, who argued that machines readable code was similar to machinery designs and thus not subject to copyright law. 20 years before Steam existed.
But I guess you can just ahead and make things up on the internet to jump aboard a hate train.
In 2003 it was pretty normal to sell your used games, on CD (or DVD) at a car boot sale or whatever.
By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn’t by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.
The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I’m not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.
I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it’s become a positive feature for a game in people’s minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.
The person who disagrees is too young to know that was ever possible. They have grown up in a dystopia so they don’t know the law is being broken or know that other countries, unlike America, stopped Steam from violating consumer laws.
Of course you don’t “own software” like you don’t own the right to distribute to reproduce a book you bought. This is about resale rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
The Supreme Court ruled and Congress ratified into law that once a copyrighted work is sold, the owner gives up the right to control resale. The specific case was book publishers who added a disclaimer that the book couldn’t be resold cheaply after purchase.
This is exactly what Steam prevents.
be noted that steam added DRM in 2008 and DRM exist since '90s, one of the first companies to use it was Nintendo, before the 2000 the USA made the DMCA (i think?) 2001, 2003 and 2004 the EU also passed some law about copyright protection(and maybe DRM?) in the early and mid 2008 many companies before valve started to also use DRM (see Spore, assasin’s creed, etc etc) during the later 2008 and early 2009 DRM was also added by EA, Ubisoft and Atari, alonside Valve
Steam added DRM at the very start. And it was originally worse until the public pushed back.
You couldn’t play HL2 without online verification through Steam.
Oh right, i forgor about that, then i correct myself: Valve didn’t give to developers tools to add DRM until 2008
For the record, the iTunes Store is actually like 6 months older than Steam.
You haven’t been able to resell your used PC games since the invention of the CD key and SecuROM.
That is absolutely not true. You sold your game with the key. Nothing about CD keys nor secure rom stopped this. The CD key gave the game the location of the specially stamped spot on the CD to verify it was the original CD. SecureRom kept people from selling copies. It did not stop selling the original.
SecuROM limited you to 2-5 activations per CD key.
You could revoke authorizations. Which didn’t matter because until 2007 it didn’t need Internet activation.
Why does this dude have to be a billionaire? Like he has some decent views, but being a billionaire generally not ethical unless you are a billionaire in Indonesian Rupiah, because then it would only be tens of thousands of Euros.
Man simply got rich on the platform he helped created. Hardly recall any instance he asked for more.
there is no such thing as “simply” when it comes to capitalists.
Valve still takes 30% of revenue for every game that’s sold on Steam. Granted, you do get a fair bit for it: payment processing, deployment, advertising, statistics, workshop. But the average street mob boss who takes a cut for letting you have a brick and mortar store in his territory still only takes 10%, so that’s that for comparison.
Maybe Gaben wouldn’t have a superyacht and Valve wouldn’t be designing ultra expensive custom hardware if they took the same share as a criminal mob boss, instead of driving indi game studios out of business.
Real curious where you got that 10% figure from. Like I know you pulled it out of your ass 'cuz in my experience the real number is a flat fee for your business sector (do you really think the mob is running a tax service to calculate amounts owed??) but dude there’s no standard here. Also indie game studios are absolutely flourishing right now, especially on steam.
There’s real reasons to criticize Steam, maybe use some of them instead of just making stuff up?
Just talking from personal experience for the figures, it doesn’t really matter. Do you really think Valve is entitled to a third of everything that they let on their platform? Absurd.
You could have lead with presenting their 30% cut as absurd on its own and had a discussion about that! Or gone with the lootbox/skin controversies in CS, or the license-only access to digital goods, or even their abandonment of game development in favor of becoming the middleman but… instead you chose to make the claim that steam is 3x greedier than the actual mob. So, because that’s your whole argument, it absolutely does matter that the numbers you’re using to demonstrate the validity of your point are lies you just made up to make your argument sound good.
There is a real and important discussion to be had here, and bringing in your bullshit does nothing but damage the credibility of the people you support who are actually trying to have that discussion.
I don’t think it’s necessarily evil to become a billionaire. But remaining one absolutely is.
