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.

he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off

I’m okay with this. Same deal with Costco’s founders and CEOs. It’d be nice if billionaires didn’t exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.

I’ll praise the ones that at least try to do some “good” for people. Even if their “good” is “Let’s make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the ‘good guy’ in the industry”.

I’m not okay with this because it incentivizes companies and influencers to work together to lower people’s standards.

People are proud to accept garbage these days.

I ask genuinely – what alternative do we have?