No corporation or billionaire is your friend. No matter how nice they appear just because the rest are genocidal sociopaths.

Not all of them are necessarily evil either, but regardless of their intentions, they're almost always a net loss for society.

He's also not an enemy though. For an extremely wealthy person he's a decent guy imo. Then again, I don't know everything about him

Fairly happy to find a business that wants to make money long term. Pretty rare these days. I would say thats a good thing, wouldnt you?

How do they do it? Looks like expanding into the open hardware space, the open source space, have good customer service and avoid ads except to promote games.

And the alternative is what? GOG?

In the end they are just a store front, so it isnt even like they are the only place to buy a product, yet somehow they are the only ones that seem to even give a shit about me playing games on Linux.

And then there are the employees. As far as we know (please if you work at valve say something) they are the highest compensated people in the it/game industry.

No, Valve is privately owned. That means the company does whatever the owners want it to do. Unlike public companies which can be sued by their own shareholders of they don't pursue profits hard enough.

That's not to say we should blindly idolize a billionaire, but he and in turn Valve can in fact do things that are friendly to consumers.

That's...that's how a business should operate. Not chasing quarterly reviews and stock prices, but being in business as long as feasibly possible. Making products and/or services that meet the need of the market and continual improvement of them.

Instead most businesses, especially dealing with video games, are ran by short term thinking psychopaths who only care how a quarter looks and not the long term sustainability of the entire company. They saw a massive influx during the Covid lockdowns and didn't realize that was temporary growth for a particular difficult time so keep chasing those kinds of profits with layoffs, studio closures.

I think Gabe acts more like the European rich. They are still pieces of shit, but they learned a long time ago to STFU about their money after a long history involving guillotines and the like that the U.S. hasn’t experienced to the same extent just yet.

You are not my friend, doesn't mean you are my enemy either.

I will settle for a company who's demonstrated long term strategy is mostly in line with my interests. It's not perfect, but I'll take "morale because it's profitable" over "enshitifcation for a quick profit"

Corporations are not your friends. They may do something you like but will shit on you if it benefits them.

Their organizational method is pretty cool and their book on it is open sourced.

I like steam I send them a christmas card every year with my life updates.

I never thought he was my friend. The CEO being my friend is not a requirement for running a company I don't mind buying from.

Do you refuse to buy toilet paper because no TP company CEO is your friend either?

Yeah, og only more companies thought that way. Most seem to only care about making money in the short term.

Yeah you're right 😔 why can't they be motivated by morals and social high standings like people

Fuck capitalism

Billionaires would be cooler if their obsession was the bettering of mankind

Swallowed by the waves, occosionally. Without heirs.

Billionaires would be cooler if there were mythical creatures that don‘t exist but we tell stories about heroes who slay them.

I never thought of this. That is tragic. It would also be cool if they got obsessed with airships

I guess if they ever decide to go public, that would be the start of the enshittification process.

Steam is a good service compared to the alternatives, but corpos will always be corpos

This. I was telling friends back when Google's motto was "Don't be evil" because the rule is never trust a corporation.

Then again, I grew up around the home of WalMart so I guess I may have been used to shitty tactics with the veneer of "helping the community"

It'll happen when Gabe dies and gets replaced

What's wrong with having yachts, and a yacht company?

The business provides a service, employes people, most of his employees made a million a year.

Yeah he’s a billionaire, but he at least seems to be an old school tycoon in the sense of… doing actual philanthropy, instead of fancy accounting fraud / money laundering with a non profit happy face on top.

He owns a fleet o megayachts and one of the biggest companies making these who commissioned megayachts for bezos and russian oligarchs, he's just a piece of shit like all the others. We are on the verge of a climate disaster, one of these boats consume in one hour as much you will do in your lifetime, stop wasting your time defending this idiot, he's not a scientist.

To my knowledge… he basically just has more money than he knows what to do with,

To my knowledge you don't end up with more money than you know what to do with by being a good person. Valve did a lot of shit such as promoting gambling to kids

My billionaire is better then your billionaire because he owns something I like.

Like imagine what you could do with that kind of cash. You don't even have to give it away, you can just run good businesses that aren't based on unsustainable greed.

Say you build decent housing and set the rents so the break-even date is 40 years from now, let your foundation own it, and kick back with a tall glass of milk. Say you build an insulin factory in Vermont and pump out pens at $7 each. Say you buy up some farmland and build proper greenhouses to grow food efficiently, allowing 90% of the land be rewilded.

Why in the fuck would you buy 3 Bugattis every year.

Or just putting the money back into the company or wages.

I thought his yachts were specifically designed as ocean research vessels no? Like the whole reason to buy the company out was to use their resources to make custom order research vessels (with submarine and medical bays) cheaper.

Not to say there aren't better causes, there absolutely are, but if he's out there pushing our scientific knowledge forward, I'm here for it.

I actually support the rich spending money on extravagant yachts. The problem is when rich people hoard money and just use it to get richer. When they spend it, that money goes to employing people. Do you have any idea how many workers it takes to build a yacht? Then you have to hire people to maintain and run the thing. It's a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the working class.

When rich people try to use their money to "improve society" they inevitably end up using it to influence politics and to try and control things. After all, if your goal is to use your money to help to improve the world as best you see it, you quickly realize that the best bang for your buck is by buying politicians.

For example, imagine someone genuinely does want to spend a billion dollars to help people get medical care. You could spend that billion on paying people's medical bills, or you could spend a billion dollars lobbying for Medicare for all. If you're trying to spend money to change the world in a direction you feel is best, politicians are the best bang for your buck. So you end up with politicians being bought by various rich people, each tasked with enacting what the rich people view as the best path for the world. One way or another, it means that the wealthy completely control the government, rather than the people. And while you're probably in favor of Medicare for all, the rich people will be lobbying for whatever they think the world needs most. Their idea of charity might be spending a billion dollars to "protect babies" by lobbying against abortion.

I would rather the rich spend every penny they have on extravagant luxuries. Their ideas of charity are usually quite different from my own.

They don't have enough cash to help the poor or feed everyone, let alone tackle housing. California already spends 60k per homeless and hasn't fixed anything. So thing another billion is the problem?

Why would toothpicks be useful in a gold rush?

If Epic took like 10% of the budget they use for free games and timed exclusives and put that towards making their UX not dogshit, Valve wouldn't even have a monopoly.

The reason people like him even here where most billionaires are hated, is that he's doing essentially nothing to maintain the monopoly and Valve gives back to the community by working on Linux compatibility. Sweeney, despite having much less market share, is the one engaging in monopolistic practices (paying for exclusives in particular) and refuses to even consider Linux a potential target OS, he wants gaming to remain Windows-only.

So, I love boats and sailing.

Megayachts aren't for people who love boats and sailing, they're for rich people who love the privacy of having a mobile private island. In their operation (big diesel engines, fiberglass hulls made with MEK, dumping raw sewage and such), they pollute a lot more than basically any other method of travel/living.

The people at Gabe Newell's company probably make decent money. But it's a dangerous job working with extremely toxic chemicals (if it's good for the boat, it's bad for the environment, and it's bad for the workers). A lot of them probably have to retire early with health problems.

I love boats and sailing, but this megayacht shit sucks.

Tell me I’m wrong.

You are wrong. Russian oligarchs and billionares shouldn't have access to any sort of luxury the same way a pedophile or a rapist shouldn't. They are criminals. You can be rich, even a millionaire but to get away with a billion you have to play dirty and be greedy. Valve did evil shit such as promoting gambling to kids. Owning multiples megayachts it's not like watching tv or playing videogames it's more like collecting elephants tusks. We are on the verge of a climate crisis and everyone is getting poorer, the megayachts business is a smack in people and humanity face.

Its a great example of why we don't want to abandon calculated social services for the whims of billionaire philanthropists.

Even the best billionaire backed project is still taking their part of the pie, even if it's just adhering to their vision.

EoD society generates value and we have right to collectively invest that value in bettering our own circumstance. Billionaires syphon that value from society and give it back to us pennies on the dollar.

What a weird parasocial position to attempt a sincere defense of... Really planning for the future huh, you temporarily embarrassed millionaire?

One daty you'll get that sweet mega yacht invite, and you'll be able to say, "don't worry friends, I always had your back when THEY would try to disparage you" and they'll say, "we always knew you were different, better... one of us, Stewart. We just had to wait until you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, as of course, we all had before"

The amount of tankies on here is why, some of them just hate the fact rich people exists and not the fact a lot of them simply cheat the system and exploit legal loopholes and do shady deals. I don't like that mega rich people exist but I don't care if they do simply exist, I HATE that they influence legislation and law to suit themselves in spite or neglect of the average person, It's childish to attack those who are simply successful.

So is playing Counter Strike