Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
Why eat them? You better turn them to compost, so they can actually help something grow.
Valve makes tonnes of money from loot boxes or whatever they’re called. Basically a form of gambling.
It also just so happens that a great way of making a shit load of money is making it super easy for people to buy from you. Valves big competitive advantage is just… not fucking that up. A surprising number of companies fuck that up.
And as someone else said, Gabe doesn’t have to be a billionaire. He could use his phenomenal wealth to build hospitals and help the poor, rather than building his own little private navy.
Valve is doing a lot that will make people like them, but they’re still a huge corporation, and Gabe is still a billionaire.
This is really simple. If you have more than a 1000 million dollars. Every day you decide to keep it instead of saving lives and helping people. It will never be moral
We shouldn’t eat them. I don’t want prion disease.
ABAB. All billionaires are bad.
There is no such thing as a good billionaire. There are billionaires who might be temporarily aligned with you but make no mistake, none of them will love you back…
Looking at you, Mark Cuban
Love your wallet though
He has 6 yachts from kiddie gambling…
Which gambling websites does Valve run?
CS2, for one
How can I gamble real money in CS2 and withdraw my winnings?
I think the commenter is talking about the steam marketplace featuring a lot of CS assets which people do buy and sell for real money.
What I’m talking about is that there isn’t a way to “withdraw” your money like the illegal sites let you. So no, there isn’t a way to gamble through Steam.
In fact, Steam does what they have the power to do in reporting those sites and getting them taken down.
Oh sorry, I always thought there was a way to withdraw money from your steam wallet to your bank account.
I haven’t used steam in a few years though, and haven’t interacted with the marketplace in longer than that, so wouldn’t really know!
There are third party sites where you can sell skins for money.
I’m not eating Elon Musk. That’s like dumpster diving behind a cracker barrel.
The fattest pigs make the crispiest bacon.
In ten years people will talking about the GabeCube killing PC modularity like they always saw it coming
Valve invented or normalised a ton of crap that’s plaguing modern gaming: game launchers, always online DRM, microtransactions, achivements, lootboxes…
I’m not saying you should stop using Steam. Go ahead, buy the Frame, VR is awesome and it looks like a really solid headset, but do it without kissing Gabe’s ass if you can. Corpos are not your friends.
whats wrong with game achivments?
For me, it’s when people complain that a game/system/platform doesn’t have them. Some games and systems don’t need or want to gamify playing games and that’s okay
Marketing: the end product just isn’t right. We need to make it more fun. You know like a game.
dev: What are you talking about.
Marketing: There’s this new thing called gamification. Let’s do that.
Dev: First off thats not new, its been around for ages. Whatever, what are you even talking about?
Marketing: Yeah you know, make it fun! Give people awards for accomplishing certain tasks or reaching milestones. Lots of flashy lights and celebratory music. We do it in presentations and training all the time.
Dev: That’s what xp, leveling, magic items, special skills, etc are. Your asking me to gamify a fucking video game?!?!
Marketing: Yeah exactly! Its gonna be awesome!
To be clear I don’t think achievement s are bad. I don’t personally care about them. This is just how I imagine the conversation went when they were thought of.
I don’t care if they exist or not. The complaints that XYZ doesn’t have them is what makes me dislike them. Like who cares if Switch doesn’t have achievements? Go play the game and have fun
They didn’t invent them. The Xbox 360 already had achievements years before them.
I didn’t say Valve did. I said why I don’t like achievement systems or, I guess more accurately, why I don’t think everything needs them
deleted by creator
I’m glad you deleted your comment because it had nothing to do with my point
They’re nothing but a skinner box that’s supposed to keep you playing games for longer. It’s the same type of instant gratification built into most mobile game, but applied to everything else.
In a system where you pay once for the game, isn’t that a good thing? It lets you enjoy the game for longer instead of making you constantly buy new games, thus spending less money for the same amount of enjoyment.
It’s meant to keep you playing after you stop enjoying said game. Besides, pay once? Shit like this is very often paired with the free-to-play and microstransactions model.
I really dont think its that bad. I can see the argument that they should be able to be disabled for people with OCD or something. I used to feel some kind of FOMO for not 100% every game.
Right, that’s a fair criticism with regards to microtransactions. I don’t know much about those kinds of games though, so I can’t really say much about it.
My partner bought Skyrim twice (Steam and Switch) and 100%'d both, and now is going through the same process with BG3. I’m just thinking about how the achievement system is acting like a multiplier to the game’s value in this instance.
None of that was invented by Valve. “Normalize” is subjective but I would argue they didn’t do any of that either.
Launchers existed for a long, long time before Steam- part of what made Steam so successful was having a centralized launcher for games from a lot of different companies together. Before then there was usually a separate launcher for each game.
Online DRM has existed for as long as the Internet was ubiquitous enough to get away with it. Offline DRM existed before that. Even back in the 80’s games would ship with all sorts of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only 2 Valve games that ever had DRM were Artifact and DOTA 2, both of which were online multiplayer-only games, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Maple Story is pretty widely considered to be the first game with micro transactions, and they were in the form of loot boxes. By the time Team Fortress came out the concept was already popularized in MMO’s, Facebook games like Farmville, and FIFA.
Achievements aren’t something I really care about, but game had those concepts for years. I remember playing Spyro 2 as a kid and tracking down all the skill points. Sure it doesn’t use the word “achievement” but even today Sony uses the word “Trophy” to mean the same thing.
Corporations aren’t your friend of course, it’s just weird that people think Valve invented these things. And Valve’s implementations are some of the most benign and consumer-friendly cases in the industry.
The launcher i consider a positive - it’s a great way to organize my library, including non-steam games. There’s tons of free features I use all the time, like Remote Play, free Cloud Saves, friend management. It’s great for managing inputs from all sorts of different controllers, managing systems with multiple displays, allowing me to control everything with a controller without having to set it down to use my mouse and keyboard. They have great mod support for the games that use it. There’s tons more features I don’t use. It’s not just a launcher like EA Play or UPlay- it’s a full platform. It’s so useful that I even added GOG Galaxy as a non-steam game.
Any business needs to balance the needs of its stakeholders. Owners, partners, creditors, consumers, employees, governments, etc. Valve is one of the fairest companies left alive in 2025 at balancing all of these entities, and yet in every online discussion about them someone always feels the need to pipe in and be like “well aktually they are secretly very bad!”, just because they don’t have the power to stop other companies from being shitty. They don’t have the bargaining power to tell Sega to get rid of Denuvo on a games from prior generations selling for $20. They don’t have the bargaining power to Ubisoft or Larian to drop their annoying launchers. They don’t have the power to tell other publishers and devs to stop adding pay-to-win mechanics. They don’t have the power to stand up to payment processors that are demanding certain content be removed from the store.
Valve DOES have the power to promote Linux as a legitimately viable operating system for gamers, behind Linux enthusiasts. They have the power to get Microsoft to drop their ridiculous store. They have the power to get Ubisoft to at least add their games to Steam, even if you need a dumb launcher still. They have the power to clearly and consistently label games with DRM in their store so consumers can make informed decisions without spending hours digging through the legalize or EULA’s or doing research on enthusiast forums.
It’s fair to question whether Valve’s 30% cut is justified for every publisher, though we also know that some publishers have been able to make separate deals at times. I’m sure you can find other things that are fair to question. It’s really weird to accuse people of “kissing Gabe’s ass” just for recognizing that Steam is the best platform for a consumer to use right now.
Blaming game launchers on Steam is like blaming streaming becoming unusable on Netflix. They were having success being (probably) the first ones to do it and when other companies saw that they tried to copy their success, only to find out that what made the original product successful was that they were the only ones doing it and that was (unlike the new landscape the companies just created) incredibly useful.
The sad fact of the matter is that while having a one stop shop for anything sounds great, once a solution in a certain field gets successful the other companies trying to achive the same success will fly in like vultures and make it forever impossible to have just one service that unites everything into one neat package.
Gabe and Swift are not obligate billionaires. They both have the capacity to adjust their wealth to avoid the cutoff.
He can buy his freedom by using his wealth to finally release hl3
I’ll let the normies keep swift if we can keep gabe
They are both part of the problem.
A billionaire who gives away 99% of their wealth to the poorest, first and exclusively, isn’t a billionaire, and still has enough money (maybe more!) for the rest of time.
Not off you have a fleet of yachts
In my opinion if anyone has billions of dollars and hasn’t given a majority of it away to charity or those in need, that person is on some level at least somewhat an evil person.
Sure, much of it would be tied up in stocks and stuff that legally can’t be sold for specific purposes or timeframes, but if you have net worth in the billions and any stocks that could be sold for cash and then donated it should be. Or if you have an annual income that’s much more than you need to live an extremely comfortable life and then you just spend and invest the excess instead of donate.
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments transferred to the IRS annually, to be auctioned slowly over time. The first $10 million held by a natural person may be exempted from this requirement. No exemptions for artificial “persons”.
