People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
We’re just at the point where “basically fine” is hands down better than the majority. Even if they were forced by regulation, they followed the regulations instead of ignoring them and fighting an insane court battle to nit pick it for the next decade.
Like, valve doesn’t seem to be trying to undermine democracy or somehow bring about an actively worse world. They seem to mostly obey the law and keep orderly as regulations change.
If you said you wouldn’t mind living Gabes life, I wouldn’t think you’re a sociopath.
People saying that valve is great says a lot more about the rest of the companies than it does about valve, but it still leaves valve near the top of the pile.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent, and there’s always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it’s “supposed to” is still capitalism.
It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.
However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).
It’s not network effects (but slightly related), it’s opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn’t hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn’t cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they’ll drop you if you’re small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They’re big enough that many devs think it’s worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that’s what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co
I think we’re just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.
“Hi! We’re valve. We’re mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn’t deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn’t deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves” – Hands down one of the best “big” companies out there.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
While I won’t defend that he could be much more altruistic with his money, but complying with different refund laws at a digital level is super easy to do. Even more so for Australia, since it isn’t like anyone bouncing between country borders all the time there.
A billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab.
Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization’s mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientists
While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.
The situation sucks, but I guess we have to count our “wins” these days.
If this money he is using to advance marine science was taxed, I guarantee it would be given straight to the US Military for creating more weapons of mass destruction.
Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”
It is possible to acknowledge that a billionaire is doing a good thing with his ungodly wealth, while also saying that he should not have that level of wealth to begin with.
I’d be all for removing all the tax cuts from the rich and funneling it into the sciences. They’ve proven that trickle-down is an excuse to hoard and that noblesse oblige is all but dead, so why not cut out the proverbial middleman.
I’m also not a politician being paid by said rich to keep those cuts in place or add more, so my stance means little.
Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.
Threre is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. An ethical billionaire doesn’t remain a billionaire. If a suddenly recieved a billion dollars I’d be looking into the best way to donate most of it.
I’m sure I could survive for the rest of my life just fine on $500 million dollars, and whatever causes I’m donating my money to know what they need and how to spend it better than I would by offering them a couple of rooms on my third yacht.
Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.
Why does he need society’s input? Last I checked, charities didn’t ask society at large, they just get funding from the people who care. Am I wrong to go to the park to pick up litter without asking society at large if that’s the best use of my time?
We don’t need to have everything go through a committee. If he wants to do a good thing, that’s awesome.
It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.
How? All you’re really doing here is stereotyping rich people.
For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn’t mean all Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.
GabeN is hardly rich enough to end poverty or even just hunger, and that’s not the only important cause people could work on. I’d be happy if every billionaire picked some cause and donated to it, no need for society’s input.
This yacht is many things, one of them being a floating lab. It’s not like it isn’t a super-luxury yacht for $500 million, also. Or like he hasn’t a couple more super-yachts.
I mean, good for the man, good that he’s doing marine conservation on the side, or that he actually cares about his companies, employees, etc. But also, wow, what kind of amounts do billionaires spend on playthings, and what you could do with such money for the betterment of society.
People love them because they still offer good products and services, some of them completely for free. I think it’s perfectly valid to recognize and appreciate the good, even when there’s also bad.
I’m not giving Valve recognition, I’m recognizing that Valve offers good/useful products and services. Maybe I should have said “acknowledge” instead of “recognize”, but you’re saying something different than me.
Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.
That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.
I agree they’re better. I am also blinded a tad, they made Team Fortress 2, my all time favorite game.
But they’re better for now. There’s nothing stopping them from changing their ways when Gabe retires/dies. Maybe they have a private agreement/contract for the next guy to abide by. Maybe they don’t.
All I know is, Valve is mostly good right now. All major players in the tech space had some good intentions at one point (except Facebook). Google used to be about finding content on the internet quickly, easily, and without ads. Now they hide content, spam you with ads and fake overviews, and fight ad blockers.
Let’s not forget Valve started the microtransaction hell of gaming with their crates in Team Fortress 2. It worked so well they made the game free for more people to buy more crates. Blizzard’s Overwatch didn’t make you buy a key to open them, Valve still does.
Will Valve turn evil overnight? Probably not. But when Gabe is gone, the next billionaire will be as greedy to start with. They’re far from the greediest gaming company, but they probably won’t roll back any of their percentage cuts or ease off on the gambling in their games.
And I’ll just have to sign and shake my head as I told people that trusting a company you like remaining a company to like isn’t a good thing in a world like ours.
StarCraft was one of my favorite games growing up. I can still quote most of the Terran units.
I don’t know when or where to say they officially went from “Good with issues” to “Bad with some good games”. Doesn’t help they ignored their work culture for over a decade.
You must likely will never earn more than 2 mil in your lifetime. With 2 orders of magnitude and a doubling factor, that’s still not 500M lmao. And just like a car purchase, that’s only for the purchase price, not the upkeep.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole after skimming through the article…
I’m guilty of going on about the luxury side of this, but Leviathan has also been designed with scientific work in mind: Newell’s interests now include Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces (popularly known as “brain chips”), and Inkfish, a marine research operation
Neural interfaces? Uh oh, that reminds me of another billionaire and a heart-breaking story about animal testing.
Unlike bulky, invasive BCIs used in medical settings, the Starfish chip is designed to be minimally invasive, leveraging a proprietary array of microelectrodes that attach to the scalp.
The device’s compact design, roughly the size of a postage stamp, also addresses a common hurdle in consumer neurotech: wearability. Early prototypes suggest the chip could be discreetly integrated into headbands, VR headsets, or even augmented reality glasses.
Oh ok… well that doesn’t sound as bad. Wait, didn’t Valve just announce a new VR headset that has a port which can be used for 3rd party accessories?
BCIs inevitably raise questions about privacy, data security, and ethical AI use. Starfish claims its device anonymizes neural data and processes most information locally, rather than cloud servers. Still, skeptics argue that neural data’s intimate nature demands stricter regulatory frameworks.
Dr. Rachel Kim, a bioethicist at Stanford University, cautions, “The benefits are immense, but we need clear guidelines on who owns brain data and how it’s monetized. This isn’t just another app—it’s a window into the human mind.”
If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.
Yeah, I don’t understand people who ascribe more to GabeN than running a decent business. Steam has done right by me, so I remain a customer. I didn’t play many games before Steam came to Linux, then I played more and more as Linux support improved (Proton was game changing),.
My opinion of him ends there. Steam is a great product, as is the Steam Deck. If Valve stops making great products, I’ll stop buying. Whether Gabe Newell is a good person is irrelevant here.
Would you buy zionist games? Are you willing to support genocide if the games are good? Do you give a shit about anything at all? You just like playing your lil gamies? Typical USAian.
Tell me what a zionist game is. I’m not from the USA nor do I live there. I’ve told my local representative to have my country recognize Palestine, that’s since been done.
Anyway, I wish you a good day riding upon your high horse.
And I mean Gabe is overseeing the Valve team’s success, allowing his employees to develop at their pace and following what appears to be their passion. They aren’t shoehorning AI or whatever the latest buzzword to goose some imaginary number. Gabe was pissed at Windows enough, he used to work for Microsoft, so he’s instrumental in helping break Microsoft’s monopoly on gaming operating systems by supporting Linux compatibility and releasing first party hardware.
He deserves credit for the culture he cultivates in his company and shares in its success. Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing. The main reason why it is viewed as refreshingly good is because they seem to be one of the few big companies that still believe that profit growth comes from valuing employees, suppliers (gamedevs) and consumers, rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of profit no matter how cruel. It should be the norm yet it seems to be the exception.
It would be nice to have no billionaires, but right now we live in a world where government tells states to clawback aid they gave to hungry families so taxing the rich, or acting in any way that resembles normalcy, is a lot to expect right now. We can let Gabe make a silly luxury purchase.
If Valve burns the trust it has earned, then I will move away from them too, I don’t owe Gabe or Valve anything.
Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing.
And while theirs is bad, it’s also one of the less bad of the MTX nonsense since you can trade stuff on the market, no? So even when they’re bad, they’re on the less bad end of the spectrum.
It would be nice to have no billionaires,
I agree, but the next best is to eliminate generational wealth. Maybe there should be caps on how much can be inherited, with the rest going to charities the heirs don’t directly benefit from.
I don’t think billionaires are automatically bad people, but there is a strong correlation between huge wealth and bad people.
He’s just another billionaire. Probably just not the typical sociopathic ones or a narcissist.
Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam with irrevocable covenants in its governance that are not manipulated by the next sociopath to take leadership of the company, like Altman is doing with OpenAI.
Point being, he might not be a sociopath like the majority of them, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, but he’s not a saint either.
There’s also the platforms moderation issues with shitloads of bigotry. Feels like a blind eye but maybe it’s just me. They could take a spare billion in profits, throw it into low risks stocks with dividends or bonds, and pay a team to moderate it out of that in perpetuity without affecting his business or his life like how college endowments work. That is unless the goal for him is still more billions.
Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam
I’ve read horror stories on how valve is run. It’s flat amongst the average dev, but they still get those scary phones calls from wherever other location the management works in where they randomly cut projects and dozens of jobs at any time.
I don’t think anyone thinks he’s a saint, despite the memes. Except if you compare him to the fucking sleazeballs at companies like Epic, Rockstar, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, etc. etc., not to mention every other publicly traded corporation, he kind of his. Again, by comparison. He single-handedly improves the entire industry. He could very well have developed a locked down Steam OS that won’t do anything but play games but he instead invested in an open source platform that sorely needed it, and makes the world a better place. Steam doesn’t have to put up big banners for Denuvo or AI or games that require a remote account but they do, purely for the benefit of the users.
It’s like he said decades ago, or near decades ago. Piracy is a quality of service problem.
When you do the right thing the right way, people will come and you can make a shit load of money. It doesn’t even mean he has to have done everything right, but you do enough right non-anti-competitive things like that, and it makes a difference.
Same thing like you said about SteamOS. They didn’t have to make it open, and could have made money, but the ecosystem that can be built around an open platform, and the people you can draw to it are going to be miles better than a closed system where thats the mindset from the top.
“single-handedly” lmao, as if newell is the guy doing all the work and not the valve employees who work for him… or, yknow, the contributors to all the open-source projects steamos is built on
proton and steamos would be nowhere today without the decades of work by the WINE/DXVK contributors, and the myriad of other open-source projects that make Linux into what it is. all valve did was add their proprietary client on top of that (as well as fund the development of proton, tbf, i’m thankful for them on that one… but again, that work was done by valve employees and contributors, not the billionaire CEO)
He used to make games. He stopped making games to sell other people’s games.
I get why people like Steam, but when people say you shouldn’t play games that require other launchers, especially when all-in-one launchers like Playnite exist… I think people should get off his dick a bit.
The problem I have is that Valve used to make GREAT games. And there’s so much trash and shovelware out there, it would be nice to see a good developer come back. The hope is that they will at least make good gaming hardware.
even then, “he used to make games”… was he alone? did he not have a team with him? where are their billions?
valve is an alright company all things considered, but it’s baffling to me how many people act like they’re the second coming… people should know better. valve is a corporation operating under capitalism. they’re not above doing shady stuff for profit.
Also, I’m pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly “Gabe Newell making Portal”. Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).
Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.
Valve have really opened the floor for others to make good games though, right? I remember hanging out in indie game dev spaces about… 15-20 years ago, and many people’s best hope was to get accepted by a publisher and get 40% of sale revenue (publisher kept 60%). Getting onto Steam back then was very difficult (before greenlight).
Now anyone can publish on Steam, for better or for worse, and there are heaps of really cool indie games that rise to the top. Indie games were instrumental in the early days of VR as well.
Valve seem to have switched to a supporting role. They are developing hardware because it’s a gap they see in broadening their audience, and they let developers fill in the software because today being a game developer is really accessible.
To be fair, HL: Alyx was a pretty great game, that arguably gave you experience jumps like the original Half Life. I don’t remember much about it but I remember enjoying playing it. The little moments when you discover things like how you can write on a whiteboard by picking up a pen, or that you can only carry two grenades on your belt, but you can pick up a bucket and carry it around full of grenades, things that weren’t really possible in the same way until that new medium that they developed top of line hardware for.
I mean, they are still making games, even if they’re not the games you want. CS2 released not long ago, Deadlock is under very active development, and there’s some decent reasons to believe another game is currently in progress (like their Steam developer page showing 2 upcoming games).
I dont have a problem with it. If i had that much money i would buy crazy shit too. I start to have a problem with it when it encroaches on my quality of life (buying politicians, scooping up homes meant for families, etc)
Tbf gabe has been pushing for ocean exploration for a long time since we barely know our oceans and he has the money to fund that. Very cool stuff normal people can’t do.
There are a lot of things governments are not doing that people with money do that benefit everyone and that’s a good thing imo. Governments want to be liked and be re-elected by the mass and that means doing the things a lot of people care about wich is a good thing too. A lot of good is also being done in the world not by billionaires or governments but by groups of people with goals that asks for funding from average people and rich people to reach their goals. I will always applaud people for doing good things. That doesn’t mean i can’t be very critical when they are doing bad things. As far as i know the boats gabe newell is buying are for research and not to chill and have parties.
that moment when the One Good Billionaire™ casually orders a boat that costs several times more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes 🙃
i get that there’s worse out there but i’m tired of people acting like newell is a saint… he’s just another billionaire.
He owns the 50th largest yacht in the world and 5 more, i would argue he’s on top with the worst not just another
People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
We’re just at the point where “basically fine” is hands down better than the majority. Even if they were forced by regulation, they followed the regulations instead of ignoring them and fighting an insane court battle to nit pick it for the next decade.
Like, valve doesn’t seem to be trying to undermine democracy or somehow bring about an actively worse world. They seem to mostly obey the law and keep orderly as regulations change.
If you said you wouldn’t mind living Gabes life, I wouldn’t think you’re a sociopath.
People saying that valve is great says a lot more about the rest of the companies than it does about valve, but it still leaves valve near the top of the pile.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent, and there’s always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it’s “supposed to” is still capitalism.
It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.
However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).
My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
It’s not network effects (but slightly related), it’s opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn’t hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn’t cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they’ll drop you if you’re small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They’re big enough that many devs think it’s worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that’s what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co
Network effects and chill?
I think we’re just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.
“Hi! We’re valve. We’re mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn’t deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn’t deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves” – Hands down one of the best “big” companies out there.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
I agree, it’s easier to do it worldwide, but that doesn’t stop companies from writing extra code to comply with local restrictions only locally.
Look at all the US companies where their websites function differently if you are in california or not.
It was a law, but they were by no means forced to be good about it and let everyone in the world benefit.
While I won’t defend that he could be much more altruistic with his money, but complying with different refund laws at a digital level is super easy to do. Even more so for Australia, since it isn’t like anyone bouncing between country borders all the time there.
Look at it from a different point of view: those 500 Million were moved from One Good Billionaire to Multiple Evil Millionairs. Yay.
A billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab.
Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization’s mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientists
Imagine believing this.
If your hobby is marine conservation you don’t own a fleet of luxury mega yachts
100000%.
While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.
No it’s just bullshit.
The situation sucks, but I guess we have to count our “wins” these days.
If this money he is using to advance marine science was taxed, I guarantee it would be given straight to the US Military for creating more weapons of mass destruction.
A lot of things need to change in this world.
He’s not advancing anything but big boats polluting the planet.
I don’t think anyone is saying that billionaires existing is a good thing.
Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”
It is possible to acknowledge that a billionaire is doing a good thing with his ungodly wealth, while also saying that he should not have that level of wealth to begin with.
It’s not “but”, it’s “at least”.
I’d be all for removing all the tax cuts from the rich and funneling it into the sciences. They’ve proven that trickle-down is an excuse to hoard and that noblesse oblige is all but dead, so why not cut out the proverbial middleman.
I’m also not a politician being paid by said rich to keep those cuts in place or add more, so my stance means little.
Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.
Threre is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. An ethical billionaire doesn’t remain a billionaire. If a suddenly recieved a billion dollars I’d be looking into the best way to donate most of it.
I’m sure I could survive for the rest of my life just fine on $500 million dollars, and whatever causes I’m donating my money to know what they need and how to spend it better than I would by offering them a couple of rooms on my third yacht.
Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.
Why does he need society’s input? Last I checked, charities didn’t ask society at large, they just get funding from the people who care. Am I wrong to go to the park to pick up litter without asking society at large if that’s the best use of my time?
We don’t need to have everything go through a committee. If he wants to do a good thing, that’s awesome.
That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.
No, I’m explicitly rejecting your point.
It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.
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It seems really really relevant though…
How? All you’re really doing here is stereotyping rich people.
For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn’t mean all Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.
The fact of having a dragon’s hoard of money while people starve is what I am looking at.
Oh, look at that, Gabe has a dragon’s hoard of money and people are starving.
GabeN is hardly rich enough to end poverty or even just hunger, and that’s not the only important cause people could work on. I’d be happy if every billionaire picked some cause and donated to it, no need for society’s input.
This yacht is many things, one of them being a floating lab. It’s not like it isn’t a super-luxury yacht for $500 million, also. Or like he hasn’t a couple more super-yachts.
I mean, good for the man, good that he’s doing marine conservation on the side, or that he actually cares about his companies, employees, etc. But also, wow, what kind of amounts do billionaires spend on playthings, and what you could do with such money for the betterment of society.
You don’t do “marine conservation” by pumping oil into a fleet of personal yachts.
A yacht - and a yacht builder.
Refreshing to hear this take. Valve and Gabe get glazed so hard when at the end of the day it’s about the bottom dollar for them too.
Honestly I think people love them so much because everyone else has been horrible by comparison.
People love them because they still offer good products and services, some of them completely for free. I think it’s perfectly valid to recognize and appreciate the good, even when there’s also bad.
They don’t need your recognition though, I think the $500m yacht says enough.
I’m not giving Valve recognition, I’m recognizing that Valve offers good/useful products and services. Maybe I should have said “acknowledge” instead of “recognize”, but you’re saying something different than me.
Well said, Gus.
If you made people’s nostalgia, they will defend you.
Nintendo has defenders. Disney has defenders. Blizzard has defenders. And so on.
People will defend a company for free because they did something cool ~20 years ago.
Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.
That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.
I agree they’re better. I am also blinded a tad, they made Team Fortress 2, my all time favorite game.
But they’re better for now. There’s nothing stopping them from changing their ways when Gabe retires/dies. Maybe they have a private agreement/contract for the next guy to abide by. Maybe they don’t.
All I know is, Valve is mostly good right now. All major players in the tech space had some good intentions at one point (except Facebook). Google used to be about finding content on the internet quickly, easily, and without ads. Now they hide content, spam you with ads and fake overviews, and fight ad blockers.
Let’s not forget Valve started the microtransaction hell of gaming with their crates in Team Fortress 2. It worked so well they made the game free for more people to buy more crates. Blizzard’s Overwatch didn’t make you buy a key to open them, Valve still does.
Will Valve turn evil overnight? Probably not. But when Gabe is gone, the next billionaire will be as greedy to start with. They’re far from the greediest gaming company, but they probably won’t roll back any of their percentage cuts or ease off on the gambling in their games.
And I’ll just have to sign and shake my head as I told people that trusting a company you like remaining a company to like isn’t a good thing in a world like ours.
Oh man on that note talk about Blizzards fall from grace. Just a shell of their former selves.
StarCraft was one of my favorite games growing up. I can still quote most of the Terran units.
I don’t know when or where to say they officially went from “Good with issues” to “Bad with some good games”. Doesn’t help they ignored their work culture for over a decade.
Yes. They’re only horrible in the way most gaming companies were decades ago rather than the wretchedly awful way the companies are today.
You must likely will never earn more than 2 mil in your lifetime. With 2 orders of magnitude and a doubling factor, that’s still not 500M lmao. And just like a car purchase, that’s only for the purchase price, not the upkeep.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole after skimming through the article…
Neural interfaces? Uh oh, that reminds me of another billionaire and a heart-breaking story about animal testing.
https://www.gsmgotech.com/2025/05/gabe-newellbacked-starfish-bci-chip-to.html
Oh ok… well that doesn’t sound as bad. Wait, didn’t Valve just announce a new VR headset that has a port which can be used for 3rd party accessories?
Hmmm…
If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.
Yeah, I don’t understand people who ascribe more to GabeN than running a decent business. Steam has done right by me, so I remain a customer. I didn’t play many games before Steam came to Linux, then I played more and more as Linux support improved (Proton was game changing),.
My opinion of him ends there. Steam is a great product, as is the Steam Deck. If Valve stops making great products, I’ll stop buying. Whether Gabe Newell is a good person is irrelevant here.
Would you buy zionist games? Are you willing to support genocide if the games are good? Do you give a shit about anything at all? You just like playing your lil gamies? Typical USAian.
Tell me what a zionist game is. I’m not from the USA nor do I live there. I’ve told my local representative to have my country recognize Palestine, that’s since been done.
Anyway, I wish you a good day riding upon your high horse.
And I mean Gabe is overseeing the Valve team’s success, allowing his employees to develop at their pace and following what appears to be their passion. They aren’t shoehorning AI or whatever the latest buzzword to goose some imaginary number. Gabe was pissed at Windows enough, he used to work for Microsoft, so he’s instrumental in helping break Microsoft’s monopoly on gaming operating systems by supporting Linux compatibility and releasing first party hardware.
He deserves credit for the culture he cultivates in his company and shares in its success. Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing. The main reason why it is viewed as refreshingly good is because they seem to be one of the few big companies that still believe that profit growth comes from valuing employees, suppliers (gamedevs) and consumers, rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of profit no matter how cruel. It should be the norm yet it seems to be the exception.
It would be nice to have no billionaires, but right now we live in a world where government tells states to clawback aid they gave to hungry families so taxing the rich, or acting in any way that resembles normalcy, is a lot to expect right now. We can let Gabe make a silly luxury purchase.
If Valve burns the trust it has earned, then I will move away from them too, I don’t owe Gabe or Valve anything.
You know dude? This whole post is just pathetic.
Okay, thanks for the feedback.
And while theirs is bad, it’s also one of the less bad of the MTX nonsense since you can trade stuff on the market, no? So even when they’re bad, they’re on the less bad end of the spectrum.
I agree, but the next best is to eliminate generational wealth. Maybe there should be caps on how much can be inherited, with the rest going to charities the heirs don’t directly benefit from.
I don’t think billionaires are automatically bad people, but there is a strong correlation between huge wealth and bad people.
Definitely, agreed with you on all these points.
He’s just another billionaire. Probably just not the typical sociopathic ones or a narcissist.
Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam with irrevocable covenants in its governance that are not manipulated by the next sociopath to take leadership of the company, like Altman is doing with OpenAI.
Point being, he might not be a sociopath like the majority of them, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, but he’s not a saint either.
There’s also the platforms moderation issues with shitloads of bigotry. Feels like a blind eye but maybe it’s just me. They could take a spare billion in profits, throw it into low risks stocks with dividends or bonds, and pay a team to moderate it out of that in perpetuity without affecting his business or his life like how college endowments work. That is unless the goal for him is still more billions.
Who upvotes this nonsense? Non-capitalist? jfc.
Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.
I’ve read horror stories on how valve is run. It’s flat amongst the average dev, but they still get those scary phones calls from wherever other location the management works in where they randomly cut projects and dozens of jobs at any time.
I don’t think anyone thinks he’s a saint, despite the memes. Except if you compare him to the fucking sleazeballs at companies like Epic, Rockstar, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, etc. etc., not to mention every other publicly traded corporation, he kind of his. Again, by comparison. He single-handedly improves the entire industry. He could very well have developed a locked down Steam OS that won’t do anything but play games but he instead invested in an open source platform that sorely needed it, and makes the world a better place. Steam doesn’t have to put up big banners for Denuvo or AI or games that require a remote account but they do, purely for the benefit of the users.
It’s like he said decades ago, or near decades ago. Piracy is a quality of service problem.
When you do the right thing the right way, people will come and you can make a shit load of money. It doesn’t even mean he has to have done everything right, but you do enough right non-anti-competitive things like that, and it makes a difference.
Same thing like you said about SteamOS. They didn’t have to make it open, and could have made money, but the ecosystem that can be built around an open platform, and the people you can draw to it are going to be miles better than a closed system where thats the mindset from the top.
“single-handedly” lmao, as if newell is the guy doing all the work and not the valve employees who work for him… or, yknow, the contributors to all the open-source projects steamos is built on
proton and steamos would be nowhere today without the decades of work by the WINE/DXVK contributors, and the myriad of other open-source projects that make Linux into what it is. all valve did was add their proprietary client on top of that (as well as fund the development of proton, tbf, i’m thankful for them on that one… but again, that work was done by valve employees and contributors, not the billionaire CEO)
He’s the one who makes all the decisions. That’s what matters here.
And Proton wouldn’t exist at all without Valve.
That’s completely false.
The billionaire is the one who told them to do it.
So what? They would have eventually done it without him.
LOL what? You can’t be serious…
He used to make games. He stopped making games to sell other people’s games.
I get why people like Steam, but when people say you shouldn’t play games that require other launchers, especially when all-in-one launchers like Playnite exist… I think people should get off his dick a bit.
The problem I have is that Valve used to make GREAT games. And there’s so much trash and shovelware out there, it would be nice to see a good developer come back. The hope is that they will at least make good gaming hardware.
even then, “he used to make games”… was he alone? did he not have a team with him? where are their billions?
valve is an alright company all things considered, but it’s baffling to me how many people act like they’re the second coming… people should know better. valve is a corporation operating under capitalism. they’re not above doing shady stuff for profit.
Also, I’m pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly “Gabe Newell making Portal”. Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).
Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.
Well, I agree that the writing is really good. But the gameplay hook is what really makes it a great game tome.
Valve have really opened the floor for others to make good games though, right? I remember hanging out in indie game dev spaces about… 15-20 years ago, and many people’s best hope was to get accepted by a publisher and get 40% of sale revenue (publisher kept 60%). Getting onto Steam back then was very difficult (before greenlight).
Now anyone can publish on Steam, for better or for worse, and there are heaps of really cool indie games that rise to the top. Indie games were instrumental in the early days of VR as well.
Valve seem to have switched to a supporting role. They are developing hardware because it’s a gap they see in broadening their audience, and they let developers fill in the software because today being a game developer is really accessible.
To be fair, HL: Alyx was a pretty great game, that arguably gave you experience jumps like the original Half Life. I don’t remember much about it but I remember enjoying playing it. The little moments when you discover things like how you can write on a whiteboard by picking up a pen, or that you can only carry two grenades on your belt, but you can pick up a bucket and carry it around full of grenades, things that weren’t really possible in the same way until that new medium that they developed top of line hardware for.
I mean, they are still making games, even if they’re not the games you want. CS2 released not long ago, Deadlock is under very active development, and there’s some decent reasons to believe another game is currently in progress (like their Steam developer page showing 2 upcoming games).
scratches neck
we’re getting HL3 any day now, i swear
Nobody should have that much wealth, I don’t care what they do.
I have always respected Gabe’s “fuck gamers I do what I think is cool” mindset though. Fuck gamers.
I dont have a problem with it. If i had that much money i would buy crazy shit too. I start to have a problem with it when it encroaches on my quality of life (buying politicians, scooping up homes meant for families, etc)
Tbf gabe has been pushing for ocean exploration for a long time since we barely know our oceans and he has the money to fund that. Very cool stuff normal people can’t do.
The governments of normal people could be doing it but the money is going to billionaires instead.
There are a lot of things governments are not doing that people with money do that benefit everyone and that’s a good thing imo. Governments want to be liked and be re-elected by the mass and that means doing the things a lot of people care about wich is a good thing too. A lot of good is also being done in the world not by billionaires or governments but by groups of people with goals that asks for funding from average people and rich people to reach their goals. I will always applaud people for doing good things. That doesn’t mean i can’t be very critical when they are doing bad things. As far as i know the boats gabe newell is buying are for research and not to chill and have parties.