I still don’t get why people go to bat for valve, despite all the anti consumer shit they regularly do.
They are anti-developer (though dev opinions differ), but most people aren’t affected by the anti-consumer stuff. The only instances I know are censorship with niche visual novels and case gambling (and things like crashing CSGO economy sound like good things in that regard), unless there’s more I don’t know.
Contrast this to Nintendo just saying throwing lawsuits everywhere, among other things.
They had to be forced into allowing refunds. They’re pretty shit with dealing with hacked accounts. Their forced price parity rules effectively raise prices across the industry.
Other companies being worse doesn’t make this one defacto good.
Like what?
Like offering steam sales that gets people to buy games and end up never play them
Aren’t it the devs who offer sales? Either way you just not buy something you don’t need.
Because every other gaming company is much worse.
Doesn’t make this one good
No, just less bad.
They enabled my switch to Linux and out of Microsoft’s ecosystem with their investments and technology.
I’d reckon that there are few Valve loyalists, but rather a whole bunch of people grateful for their efforts.
Why were you in the microsoft ecosystem to begin with?
Funny, I was just reading about this sort of thing in “How to blow up a pipeline”. It’s the sort of argument that seems obvious in retrospect.
When someone in the global south uses a coal stove to cook their food, they’re doing it by necessity. When a billionaire sails out on a mega yacht, it’s pure excess. Yeah, banning them won’t make the difference between 1.5C and 2.0C of global warming, but it’s low hanging fruit.
We can also ban private jets, and the only significant impact to the economy would be that some billionaires have to travel around in first class like some kind of lowly multimillionaire or upgraded plebian.
It does not matter if you think Valve makes good products or not.
Love your balanced take. Thanks for not taking about eating out guillotining humans my friend. :)
It’d be cool if these mandated these things be solar/battery/sail powered.
To be fair, if I had the money, I’d get a yacht to get out of society as well. I would gladly sail out to sea as long as possible, and plan things from there.
The fash should bomb the yachts instead of murdering poor people off the coast of venezuela.
Personally, if I had GabeN money to spend on a yacht, I would commission something similar to S/S Delphine, S/S Norrskär or / S/S Storskär, I love the classic lines of a late 1800s, early 1900s small ship.
Modern yachts/ships look so boring…
would commission something similar to S/S Delphine, S/S Norrskär or / S/S Storskär, I love the classic lines of a late 1800s, early 1900s small ship.
if you show up with one of these other billionares would think you got it from a ship breakyard
If I were a billionaire I would buy an old ass ship (forgive me IDK much about naval history) like an ironclad, retrofit it with a nuclear reactor and then full horsepower it through a yacht yard
I would probably donate most of it to a worthy cause. I don’t need anywhere near that amount of money, anything over $5M gets donated.
Why specifically $5M and not say $1M? Building a house should apparently cost you half of that, and I assume the rest is for investing into passive income?
I agree with the other guy, talk is cheap. I probably don’t need a 4k TV or multiple consoles, but I immediately started planning and buying after a raise.
I would agree that 1M is enough to live comfortably, everything on top of that you are seeking luxury that you don’t really need like an house in a fancy area or way to big
Talk is cheap.
Ok the on board hospital does make sense if he spends all his time living on the water
I like the way they list those things in the title. Like which one is the most expensive: the hospital, the submarine garage, or fifteen gaming PCs?
I’ve thought he was a piece of shit ever since he tried to monetize modding. He was so out of line, even redditors downvoted him to hell.
I buy from gog or directly from the dev nowadays.
He should probably be taxed more
Gabe Poowell.
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?
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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
30% is too much! Clearly Steam doesn’t need that much to operate (the percentage of each sale that go to Valve)
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
