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.
It shows how low the bar is. We can eat him last.
Leave gabe alone. Leave him alooonee.
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.
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?
Gabe worshipping is cringe. he’s a dude. have some self respect.
capitalist. he’s not a dude.
he just happens to run a business that is beloved by its customers and that fact is not lost on him
I’m not a fan of him, but other tech billionaires have been engaged in publicly shaming or calling for vendettas against anyone angering them. Or indulging in shameless shows of wealth. Or simping for cruel politicians in exchange for asshole policies favoring white Christian males – and enormous tax breaks. Or aiming to destroy anyone opposing them by using information stolen from the masses.
Let’s all celebrate the capitalist pig!
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.
I don’t think it’s necessarily evil to become a billionaire. But remaining one absolutely is.
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?
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.
It’s amazing how many people drop the whole “nobody becomes a billionaire by being a good person” rhetoric as soon as you mention their pet wholesome chungus billionaire.
You guys are just as bad as the people that defend musk because “he’s real life Tony Stark! He makes rockets and electric cars!!!”
Making a company that revolutionizes how games are sold around the world and markedly for the better is a better reason for having dragons hoards than manipulating the stock market. There are degrees to douchebaggery.
markedly for the better
Yeah I’m so glad I don’t actually own any of the games in my steam library.
You sound like a real person, so let me say, there’s no time to go into depth about the issue, but Valve is a billion dollar company, and you only become a billion dollar company by acting like a billion dollar company. And those actions have been as toxic and exploitative and amoral as any other.
It just so happens that Valve, exactly like early Amazon, puts the client first. They are really good to you, the 1st-world country buying gamer. They turn their exploitation towards the rest of the economy, and play by the rules.
Playing by the rules is as evil as the rules are, and boy, do we live in bad rules.
If you want, go looking around for their plentiful controversies, like their anti-competitive practices, and attempts to enforce prices in other stores. They just pull out the moment that Shit gets any attention, and walk back.
Would you be embarrassed to learn that you’re responding to an AI? Why or why not?
their anti-competitive practices
Do you have any examples? For reference, Steam does allow developers to list games on Steam and other platforms, and even to have lower prices on the other platforms. I haven’t been able to find any true examples of anti-competitive practices by Steam.
I don’t have a strong hate for Valve, but I’m fairly certain that they often DO have contracts that demand their store gets the lowest price available from at least some game developers. So if you offer a game for lower on Epic, you also have to drop your price to match it on Steam. There may be “sales” caveats in there, but I do think that’s generally the rule in at least many cases.
In fact, I think they’ve been sued over that before. (Maybe they changed the policy after the lawsuit? I’m honestly not certain; sorry.) The argument went that if a developer could offer the game for $40 to everyone, then the storefronts could argue over their own markup, and maybe other storefronts would be willing to take less than Valve does. But as it is, Valve artificially keeps prices high on other storefronts with this approach to contracts.
If your experience is different I respect that, but I don’t think that’s universal.
I’m fairly certain
Do you have something to show for it or not?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o
The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
Also
It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.
It was filed in 2024, and given approval to go to trial at the beginning of this year. It hasn’t happened yet.
/Edit: The other person responding to this suggests that the “you can’t charge lower elsewhere” clause exists when you use certain Steam features. (Selling Steam keys, using Steam’s multiplayer backend.) And if that’s the case that seems pretty reasonable to me. (I hear they’re VERY kind about keys actually.) But I hope you’ll understand that when articles I see why the case don’t mention them, I don’t know that’s the case.
At the same time, I would almost understand outlets that don’t cover digital goods like this may not understand this, or may not see the importance of them. So maybe they’ve dropped the ball here.
I’m fairly certain that they often DO have contracts that demand their store gets the lowest price available from at least some game developers.
There is a paragraph in their store contract that specifically demands price matching with other stores, but only if you sell steam keys on other stores or use the valve infrastructure for multiplayer. How its enforced is another question, but the rule itself is fair.
Maybe big studios have different contracts, but I at least haven’t heard anything contrary.
And you may well be completely on point. I don’t recall hearing those specifics in articles I’ve read, but at the same time, some large outlets may not be familiar enough with the industry to recognize the importance of Steam keys to the argument.
Because I posted it elsewhere, in going to repost an example of the coverage of those lawsuits:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o
The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
Also
It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.
It was filed in 2024, and given approval to go to trial at the beginning of this year. It hasn’t happened yet.
Yeah …? It was very easy and automated. Same as it is now.
Yes. When I first opened my account in 2016, the second game I bought had advertised Linux support, but did not run on the first 2 distros I tested. On the third distro, it ran but I couldn’t play with Windows users, so it was useless to me. I got a full refund.
Yes. They RMAd my left index controller a year out of warranty, in addition to always replying within hours. Literally never had a better support experience.
Meta on the other hand is a slew of incompetent fucks that have zero power, until you finally get pushed through to their “specialist team” who takes a fucking full day for EACH REPLY, and even then I had to basically demand a refund for something that was never shipped to me, and (once I bought one later) discovered it literally could not have even fit in the box they sent the other shit in.
Thanks for your opinion, random ass Valve salesperson.
He got there because every bad person that tried to stop him was unbelievably incompetent. He is the exception that proves the rule.
I hope his boots are tasty
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!
The key difference is that Gabe doesn’t make it a habit to dick over people. Aside from the MasterVisa problems and the gambling, Steam is pretty awesome.
Yeah it’s not like he popularised the model of only owning a licence to a game, not the game it self, popularised lootboxes and keys and made tons of money of pushing gambling on kids, had to sued into having a refund policy, popularised early access as a business model, takes a huge 30% of profits of other people’s labour, and was the first to fold to puritanicals that wouldnted him to ban certain games from the platform or anything like that.
Yeah lord Gaben is my wholesome good guy billionaire.
Please list all the other software you still buy from a box on a shelf at a store. The only one I can think of would be a copy of windows (on a USB stick!) or physical movies, and that’s a shadow of its former self even though the physical media usually comes with a key for a streamable copy.
I get the sentiment, but physical media was a dead end the second broadband became viable. I’m glad vinyl made a kind of a comeback, but come on, even consoles are digital-first nowadays.
I don’t buy any software FOSS all the way baby.
Yeah physical media died, and guess who was leading the charge on licence based media a decade before streaming was a thing?
My steam key to download steam came with my physical copy of half life 2. I was there when the old magic was written, and that HL2 box was the last physical game I ever bought for my PC. For the decade before that, almost all my games were also digital copies, just not legit ones ;) And that’s the part you’re missing. Steam and Netflix were both easier and higher quality than pirating and cheap enough to justify. Netflix decided to milk that for all its worth, but Valve stuck to its plan and has consistently offered a very good alternative to piracy, which won over a generation of digital media hoarders.
You’re not wrong that physical media was essentially doomed, and arguably it should have been as digital distribution is faster, easier, and objectively better for the planet (look into the environmental cost of manufacturing vinyl records, for example)
But who popularized the current dominant model of “you’re only buying access, not the game itself”? And before you go on about how it would be impossible to make a digital equivalent to distribution equivalent to purchasing physical media, remember gog exists and has been around and successful for almost 2 decades now
The secret sauce there is linux support. It may sound like a marginal thing, but Valve has been working on making Linux gaming viable for over a decade now and it’s paying off in spades. GOG exists, sure, but they’re a fraction of Valves influence for a reason. Besides, there was a DRM free distribution chain before GoG that everyone used, it was called piracy.
Middlemen are assholes.
Gabe is living proof that the issue is not the money or drive to make it on its own that is a problem. Its the building ones entire life and reason for being around making as much money as possible no matter what you have to do that is the issue.
In my opinion if someones only qualification for being in charge of a business is having an MBA and having been in management at other places then that are grossly unqualified to be in charge of anything outside of their own finances.
Yeah steam hasn’t enshitified. The shit bits (forums) were always shit and the rest has stayed the same.
They made a service that works and makes money and that’s enough. Sure it’s a shit load of money, but if it was any of the usual public companies it would have been destroyed by annual KPIs by now
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.
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.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
He doesn’t abuse his power as much as most billionaires, but he certainly does abuse it.
He’s not worthy of idolization, no billionaire is. No person is.
