Perks of not taking your company public? I hate two comma mfers as much as the next red blooded American, but Gabe ain’t the one.
What you’re after is a bit of socialism.
We don’t have to kill all the millionaires and billionaires, they are just required to contribute to the world more than they take, as long as they do that they can have their luxury yachts.
The problem is almost none of them actually do contribute anything to the world and most of the ones that do contribute things that the world doesn’t want. Elon Musk contributes a lot of electric cars to the world, which would be a good thing, it’s just a shame they’re all dangerous killing machines.
Elon Musk actively hinders his companies from succeeding. People need to stop glorifying his involvement in companies he paid to have his name on.
they are just required to contribute to the world more than they take
They wouldn’t be millionaires or billionaires then. You don’t get millionaire without appropriating the labor of others.
Yes! I’m actually closer to a communist but socialism would be a welcome change in the US.
At the most he’s the least horrible of them.
He should probably be taxed more
Why is everyone acting surprised, this has been Gabe’s thing for a long time? He’s super into boats and submarines and owns a submarine company or something like that. i think I’m burned out from the news cycle, getting outraged by this just feels like a waste of my emotional energy that I could spend somewhere it will matter.
Ugh. Why are people like this?
I too take to the seven seas.
Everyone on here acts like Gabe is THEIR billionaire, and Steam is THEIR capitalist billionaire corporation.
Gabe is a dirtbag and a thief by the sole virtue of being a billionaire. Nobody earns a billion dollars, you get it by stealing wages and time from the workers below you.
Steam is a dirtbag corporation as well, no matter how many fanboys try to sweep Steam’s history of fuckery under the rug
Dude, I thought you were cool.
Owning a yacht is like the lamest thing you could possibly do!
With the coolest things being feeding the hungry and housing the poor obviously.
what does he need the 15 gaming pcs for??
lmao.
You can tell that microsoft is worried about the steam machine, since they’ve started spinning up the propaganda machines against Valve.
30% is too much! Clearly Steam doesn’t need that much to operate (the percentage of each sale that go to Valve)
What’s with this obsession over Valve making profit? Should they never expand or develop new things? BTW tell your boss I want Unreal back
I’d rather see the developers of the game profit before the storefront
Yes and before Steam the Publisher kept 60%, 30% is fine
That’s like arguing the guy who beats his wife isn’t so bad because he used to cut on her too, but stopped. It should be 10% max for a store. And publishers all take too big a cut as well
What math are you basing 10% off of? Because that’s grossly undervalues the service Valve provides between a store, community hub, unintrusive optional DRM, modding platform and more
Should they never expand or develop new things?
Oh I didn’t realize they were developing $500M yachts donations…
That’s Gabes money, not Valve’s and you know it
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Gabe owns Valve. It’s the same money.
That’s a pretty significant pivot from the discussion about Steam’s operating costs and revenue share.
The original point was about whether Valve’s 30% cut is justified for the services and ecosystem they provide; things like the storefront, servers, payment processing, anti-cheat, and continued development of new features for both players and developers.
Bringing up a private individual’s personal expenditure doesn’t really engage with that topic. It’s an attempt to shift the focus from a business discussion to a personal one, which is a completely different (albeit valid?) argument.
The point is a very small percentage of that 30% is being reinvested in the company and the vast majority is going into Gabe’s pocket.
That’s a very specific and bold claim about Valve’s internal finances. Do you have access to their private balance sheets and investment budgets? Unless you do, we’re both just speculating.
Factually speaking: Valve provides a massive, global storefront, handles all payment fraud and chargebacks, provides cloud storage for games, and maintains the entire friend/community network. The 30% is the price for that bundle of services.
Whether that’s a fair price is debatable, but the personal wealth of the CEO is a distraction from that debate.
Brother, go back and read the OP. You cannot claim that 30% is fair while the man camps on an Armada of yachts worth over a billion dollars. This is not a distraction, this is the problem. There’s just no way that makes any sense.
You’re putting words in my mouth. I never called the 30% “fair.” I’ve been trying to steer the conversation toward what a discussion about its fairness should actually be based on: the value of the services Steam provides.
You are fixated on Gabe Newell’s personal wealth as the sole proof that the cut is unjust. That’s an emotional argument about wealth disparity, not a logical analysis of the platform’s costs and value.
Let me be clear: whether a CEO’s personal spending is excessive is a separate moral and political debate. It doesn’t, on its own, determine if the price of a service is justified. The cost of servers, development, support, and the global infrastructure Steam maintains is what’s relevant here.
If you want to argue that the platform itself isn’t worth the cut, make that case. But simply pointing to a yacht and saying “see, it’s unfair” is a non-sequitur. It’s a distraction from the actual economic discussion.
Yeah, I want such giants (that are basically core infrastructure of a sector) to be regulated.
Just whip up a law saying their margins can’t be over 5% of a game’s sale price (the reason is to boost smal devs & market competition). Worst case 10 ppl don’t get richer.
(It’s a bit like capping the price of a medicine, but for cultural reasons instead of healthcare reasons.)What, are they gonna quit the business bcs making only 100 million a year in net profit just isn’t worth it & would rather go do manual labour in the mines instead?
(Same logic as with taxes - if there was a 90% tax over 10 million ppl would still do the same things they do anyway, we were just taught to believe that someone earning 1bn per year would say ‘no, it’s not worth it for those 100m after taxes, I quit and now you can’t buy my good overpriced phones anymore so you lose’. It would never happen. The only difference would be in their wealth concentration, ie in their power over government/lobbies/public media.)
I mean I guess this is better than 500 million sitting off shore bank accounts. A big part of the problem is rich people don’t spend their money.
You mean the guy that took millions of gamer’s money for a series everyone loved and that allowed his company to survive, only to abandon that series in favor of making mountains of cash with another product, may not be the standup guy a bunch of fanboys thought he was?
No way.
15 gaming PCs, now that’s just too many.
I suppose we can be reassured that the Obscene Yacht industry is still going strong despite the cost of living crisis.
Fucking disgusting. There’s no way to be a billionaire while not being a total shitstain that just sucks the society dry.
