Don’t need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you’re good to go. Employees wouldn’t count contractors either so they probably have a lot more “employees” than that.

Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...

Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.

Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he’s not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he’s still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.

Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it’s just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.

The dude’s the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he’s gonna be a billionaire.

He was a billionaire before valve even existed.

He early joined Microsoft and probably had some stock but he left by 1996 so I hardly doubt that made him a real billionaire, (especially given the time).

Afaik his family was always very well off

He was a paperboy and a telegram messenger before college.

That doesn't scream old money boy.

Aren't you confusing him with someone else?

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t well off? Just as an example, there’s a media figure here in Brazil that has a whole ass “self made man” myth is surrounding him because at some point he was selling baubles in the street or other odd jobs like that. And it is indeed true that he did that, but his family owned a media network. So.

Oh and I don’t mean “well off” in the more “old money” sense, you are right. I’m fairly sure I’ve read about his parent for the first time this year, and they had fairly comfortable money, to the point that him opening valve wasn’t a real financial risk for instance.

I’ll try to look for where I’ve read that, I didn’t pick it up immediately because I don’t have a pc at hand till Monday and searching for stuff on the phone is annoying. It’s not impossible that I’m mixing up with someone else, but in fairly sure that isn’t the case.

You can’t just move the burden of proof on to others like this. You’re just spreading misinformation, even if you ultimately turn out to be right what you’re doing is unproductive and harmful.