I know he has a fleet of megayachts but i wasn't awake he owns an entire megayachts business

friendly reminder that valve is not your friend. they operate the way they do because that's their business strategy to make the most money long term.

Hardly surprising, the dude fucking loves boats. It's too bad he isn't fascinated with the age of sail. Billionaires would be cooler if they sailed in treasure galleons and were assailed by pirates.

Fuck me that’s in my home town!

You know who gets rich in a gold rush? The guy making the picks.

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

Why would toothpicks be useful in a gold rush?

Oh man you're about to get attacked for this one. I've been piled on massively for simply suggesting he was better than others.

Swallowed by the waves, occosionally. Without heirs.

They meant guitar picks dummy!

You can push them under miners' fingernails until they tell you where the gold is.

Quite a lot of people thought Elon was a decent guy once upon a time.

I just think Gabe is a bit smarter in what he says and does publicly. Most extremely wealthy people seem to be higher in measures of narcissistic traits, self-entitlement, and egocentrism.

A megayacht is defined by the ability to fit at least one standard yacht within its swimming pool while still leaving ample room for maneuvers.

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

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.

I like Gabe to be clear but come on. Even if he just isn’t as shit as the others, the guy clearly knows to separate his public and private profiles. This guy knew that him simply hammering three times on something was going to be dissected by 1 million nerds and used to confirm a game that never came.

Let’s not forget that Valve essentially made a significant portion of their money selling gambling to kids. He’s “better than others” sure, that’s because the others are so subsumed by their narcissism, they’re doing Nazi salutes on podiums while gutting welfare and spouting stale memes. It’s not exactly a high bar to stumble over.

That's where Johnny got his Cash.

Fair points. Let's hope he doesn't lose his marbles

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

Seems like a massive waste of time, skill, and resources.

But remember the CIA is TOTALLY your friend!

~unless you are a third world country. Terms and conditions may apply~

can be sued by their own shareholders if they don't pursue profits hard enough

You can be sued by anyone for anything, but many actions are unlikely to be successful, including that one. In practice, company executives have extremely broad latitude to pursue profits in a way they see fit. If the make the argument in front of court that using Linux, having pretty good customer service, a UI that doesn't suck donkey balls, and not monetising gambling addicts TOO much is the best path to long term profit, the court isn't going to say, "you know what I know better than you".

The shareholders can sue in situations where execs embezzle money, or deliberately fuck the company and leave evidence that they've done so, things like that. Not just because they think that the company should do something else.

What absolutely can and does happen is that the shareholders fire the CEO. But a public company doesn't have to be structured so that that can happen.

Elon had a full time PR team that was pushing that image since he wanted to be known and popular, then he started posting stuff himself and we all saw the mask fall off. I don't think Gabe has the same thing since he seems to try and stay out of the spotlight as much as possible.

And on top of that, Steam is just better than its competitors. As a normal consumer who enjoys decent deals, Steam is pretty great.

Regardless, we should reward socially beneficial behavior. Billionaires are humans, and as such trainable through a correct reward structure. Harm reduction is important.

The worst thing he seems to do so far is collecting the fastest and largest version of every type of vehicle. Obviously, there are always downsides, but could be tremendously worse.

He’s “better than others” sure

Was more than enough.

What I've heard is he wanted to refit the yacht that he bought, so it could support a deep sea submersible.

So... to expedite the refit, he essentially just bought the entire dockyard, the company that owns it. Literal fuck you money lol.

And he does legit use that yacht/remote submersible to sail out to deep seas, exploring the hadal zones south of Japan, other places.

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/gabe-newell-inkfish-unclassified-ocean-creature/

As I've said in other threads, dude is just actually playing Subnautica IRL.

https://youtube.com/@inkfishexpeditions

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-explorer-vessel-08172025.php

https://www.vard.com/articles/inkfish-and-vard-signs-contract-on-groundbreaking-research-vessel

https://www.parliament.gov.to/en/media-centre/latest-news/inkfish-presents-findings-from-2024-scientific-expedition-in-tonga-s-waters

I think these are all ... revolving around the same ship, not 100% sure.

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.

Also, barely anyone knows much about this, so... probably not a naked ploy for positive PR?

EDIT:

If he buys an entire island, or starts trying to do 'sea-steading', then we should be concerned.

That shit is... insane diamond hands crypto ancap fucking nonsense, unless or untill someone actually comes up with an actual well thought out plan... So far all I've seen is complete idiocy at being anything than an elaborate fraud.

If Gabe goes full Andrew Ryan/Cave Johnson, then yeah, we have a problem.

To my knowledge... he basically just has more money than he knows what to do with, so he tries to fund things that would be difficult to fund otherwise, that he also finds neat.

He's also basically founded a seemingly much more legitimate than Elon's neuralink type thing, that does novel research into BCI/brain implants, but like, targetted at actual medical breakthroughs, not like, trying to make a mass consumer general use product.

https://starfishneuroscience.com/

Judge for yourself of course, I've not deeply looked into these things, just apparently a bit more than most.

I can say that I haven't heard of any pigs or monkeys being horrifically tortured, so that's probably good.

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

Elon also had staff who described their actual job as essentially jangling keys in front of Elon, because he has a tendency to just randomly have an insane idea and decide everyone is doing that now.

So, they had to distract him from making too many stupid decisions, fucking up workflows and procesesses. He's just an idiot, who's probably mildly aspy/autistic, and that got PR transformed into 'quirky genius'. But look into what happened at PayPal, or Tesla, anything. He's incompetent at anything other than corporate ratfuckery, he's never coded or designed anything novel or useful.

This uh... was from Tesla, a decade ago. Now of course, its all sycophants.

Compare that to Valve's odd, flat-ish hierarchy, 'just work on something cool and be useful' work culture.

Gabe has been known to occasionally bring the hammer down, but the vast amount of Valve's style, intentionally created and maintained by Gabe is... hands off. Hire the actual best, they'll direct themselves, kind of thing.

Ain't perfect, but... probably a lot less of an insane tyrannical bastard than Elon.

His wealth is stolen. He is the enemy.

Gabe has a very good PR team. Don't you remember all the "Gabe plays video games too" articles? Staying out of the spotlight isn't the same as being a good person.

If he was a good person, he would be using his wealth to help society instead of owning more than a billion worth of boats. If he was a good person tbh, he'd close the spigot a bit so more profit would go to devs but he takes his fat cut like all the other store owners.

So is playing Counter Strike

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"

Shame they aren't doing those things. Steam doesn't need 30% of the profits just for hosting the downloadable file.

Fact is we need some hard regulations for all digital stores, especially when it comes to gaming but we will never get them because a large number of consumers are dead set on defending one of those stores.

You can't clamp down on Microsoft for stealing from their customers (both devs and gamers) while steam, who's making even more profits, gets a free pass.

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?

Yea it is, so it seems like everything surrounding Gabe Newell is a massive waste of time, skill, and resources.

While having only one store front is convenient, but less competitive, it is not a fault of Valve. People defend Steam because it hasn't screwed them over. Valve built good features that people like into their product, useful features for developers.

Epic Games failed because they set up a dysfunctional store, games were the same price for customers and they went aggressive with anti-consumer practices like free games and exclusives to attempt to secure a base. They offered nothing extra for the developers or customers except uncertainty, so why would anyone want to build a game library there? You can't convince someone to inconvenience themselves for a worse product, just because "Steam takes 30%!!! We only take 12%!!". Epic Store was so fucking shit, I would bet even if them savings were passed onto the customer, most would still pay more to stay on Steam.

Origin failed, UPlay failed, they all tried to profit as much as possible for themselves instead of building a good competitive product. The only other successful ones really (outside of key resellers) are GOG and itch.io, which have their own niche spaces.

They deserve negative reinforcement though. “Rewarding billionaires” for anything feels very wrong, regardless of the ends.

Eh, decent guys don't need that many boats

Andd if there's one thing billionaires love, it's gold. And if there's two things, it's gold and yachts.

But if it's three things, it's gold, yachts, and torturing miners.

I never thought Elon was a decent guy, but that's anecdotal.

that's why i said friendly reminder and not "boycott valve"

when did i say never buy anything from valve?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Ship_disaster

All billionaires are the enemy. Valve is privately-owned, which means their evil is more long-term. You know the shit Sony's getting flack for right now? Valve's been doing it for over 20 years.

3/4 into my comment. My point is, there’s always going to be people here that downvote the guy. It’s like complaining about the weather. The “all billionaires are bad” types aren’t really interested in the one exception, if he can even be qualified as that. That’s all. Who cares, compliment him anyway and they can shit on billionaires. They aren’t even necessarily mutually exclusive imo.

Don't you remember all the "Gabe plays video games too" articles?

I don't. Literally the first I'm hearing of it.

Just gets annoying that people are ready to jump down your throat constantly because they are an extremist and they're mad you're not. Like I get why they say all billionaires are bad. Fine, but the world isn't black and white. Some bad things are less bad. People need to understand this. Instead of getting enraged and accusing you of defending someone for saying "they're not as bad as others" they could chill the fuck out about it at minimum. I've definitely blocked dozens of people for that kind of extremist behavior.

Yep.

Steam is a functional monopoly, but... I'd argue it didn't get there by being underhanded, ratfucking competitors secretly or brazenly.

It just is better. It offers far more things, to both consumers and developers/sellers.

Think from an indie dev perspective. If your game is actually good? Finds a niche? You don't need marketing, basically. You don't need to budget that, Steam will do it for you. AAA gaming is basically like fucking movies at this point, sometjing like 1/3 the budget goes toward building the hype train, not the product.

Attempts to outdo or directly compete with Steam have just actually been comically incompetent, from at least my own business analyst perspective.

Yeah, it has contract terms it enforces on sellers, but imo, they're far less restrictive than say, platform/marketfront exclusivity, as had long been the norm in the video game industry.

Room for improvement? Absolutely. Functionally gambling on in game items, children doing this, is a legitimate problem. Afaik the court case with NY is still ongoing, will be interested to see how that pans out.