miskGabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs
BroBot9000Eat the Rich includes him
Eat the Rich includes him
Chloé 🥕that moment when the One Good Billionaire™ casually orders a boat that costs several times more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes 🙃
i get that there’s worse out there but i’m tired of people acting like newell is a saint… he’s just another billionaire.
CerebralHawksHe used to make games. He stopped making games to sell other people’s games.
I get why people like Steam, but when people say you shouldn’t play games that require other launchers, especially when all-in-one launchers like Playnite exist… I think people should get off his dick a bit.
The problem I have is that Valve used to make GREAT games. And there’s so much trash and shovelware out there, it would be nice to see a good developer come back. The hope is that they will at least make good gaming hardware.
even then, “he used to make games”… was he alone? did he not have a team with him? where are their billions?
valve is an alright company all things considered, but it’s baffling to me how many people act like they’re the second coming… people should know better. valve is a corporation operating under capitalism. they’re not above doing shady stuff for profit.
How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos
overloadAlso, I’m pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly “Gabe Newell making Portal”. Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).
Snot FlickermanErik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.
DaveValve have really opened the floor for others to make good games though, right? I remember hanging out in indie game dev spaces about… 15-20 years ago, and many people’s best hope was to get accepted by a publisher and get 40% of sale revenue (publisher kept 60%). Getting onto Steam back then was very difficult (before greenlight).
Now anyone can publish on Steam, for better or for worse, and there are heaps of really cool indie games that rise to the top. Indie games were instrumental in the early days of VR as well.
Valve seem to have switched to a supporting role. They are developing hardware because it’s a gap they see in broadening their audience, and they let developers fill in the software because today being a game developer is really accessible.
To be fair, HL: Alyx was a pretty great game, that arguably gave you experience jumps like the original Half Life. I don’t remember much about it but I remember enjoying playing it. The little moments when you discover things like how you can write on a whiteboard by picking up a pen, or that you can only carry two grenades on your belt, but you can pick up a bucket and carry it around full of grenades, things that weren’t really possible in the same way until that new medium that they developed top of line hardware for.
People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent,and there’s always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it’s “supposed to” is still capitalism.
It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.
However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).
the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent
My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
It’s not network effects (but slightly related), it’s opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn’t hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn’t cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they’ll drop you if you’re small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They’re big enough that many devs think it’s worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that’s what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
I agree, it’s easier to do it worldwide, but that doesn’t stop companies from writing extra code to comply with local restrictions only locally.
Look at all the US companies where their websites function differently if you are in california or not.
It was a law, but they were by no means forced to be good about it and let everyone in the world benefit.
I think we’re just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.
“Hi! We’re valve. We’re mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn’t deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn’t deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves” – Hands down one of the best “big” companies out there.
sp3ctr4lHere’s another way you can look at Valve.
They are a case study of how a privately held company, a company that does not have a boardroom of investors, demanding maximum possible short term profit, all the time…
Can actually allocate capital more efficiently, and generally more fairly, and innovate better than a ravenous hoard of interest/rent seekers.
You can look at them as essentially a counter argument to the modern American concept of a publically (stock market) traded company.
While what they do, the tech, the platform, the games… while that’s rather cutting edge… the way they do, that’s actually old school, at the level of how a business fundamentally works, is legally defined.
They are not ‘beholden to capital’ so much as they are … ‘beholden to Gabe.’
You would think business majors and economists could look at this and go… oh, turns out capital markets aren’t efficient, at all!
We are at the point now where a privately held, effective monopoly is… actually less evil than basically every other major tech firm that is entirely investor-returns / capital-rent driven… where probably roughly 20%-40% of the people/orgs on all those other boards … are just the same people, forming basically a de facto conspiracy.
Basically, being beholden to a single, publically visible capitalist, who doesn’t have to show you his internal books… appears to be objectively better than being beholden to many, obfuscated, invisible capitalists, despite them actually having to show your their books.
This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn’t work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet… and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh… kind of let you do some extremely basic office work.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn’t matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they’re forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition into the gamified, data monger, attention economy.
We’re just at the point where “basically fine” is hands down better than the majority. Even if they were forced by regulation, they followed the regulations instead of ignoring them and fighting an insane court battle to nit pick it for the next decade.
Like, valve doesn’t seem to be trying to undermine democracy or somehow bring about an actively worse world. They seem to mostly obey the law and keep orderly as regulations change.
If you said you wouldn’t mind living Gabes life, I wouldn’t think you’re a sociopath.
People saying that valve is great says a lot more about the rest of the companies than it does about valve, but it still leaves valve near the top of the pile.
Ricky RigatoniEveryone also seems to ignore that they started the lootbox epidemic.
ForesterA billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab.
Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization’s mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientists
While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.
Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”
amorpheusWhether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.
Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.
Why does he need society’s input? Last I checked, charities didn’t ask society at large, they just get funding from the people who care. Am I wrong to go to the park to pick up litter without asking society at large if that’s the best use of my time?
We don’t need to have everything go through a committee. If he wants to do a good thing, that’s awesome.
That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.
No, I’m explicitly rejecting your point.
It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.
Careful about worshipping at the altar rationality, it is as prone as any god to leading people astray.
I don’t misunderstand your point, I reject it. When have we ever seen a government care more about taking care of its people than gaining power for its rulers? The more money and responsibility you give to a government, the more corrupt it becomes.
That said, I do think something like UBI makes sense. Make it a simple cash pass-through where everyone is brought above the poverty line. I personally would prefer to structure it as a negative income tax, so you qualify if your income is below some amount, and everyone is brought between the poverty line and a “living wage” (say, 2X poverty line). It’s equivalent to UBI, just with less sticker shock and a clearer paper trail (need to file a tax return). Look at the government shutdown, social security is still going out, I want NIT to be the same (and ideally replace SS).
I say we replace all welfare programs with a UBI-type system. Charities would then exist to help people manage that money, get out of addictions, etc… If people are mistreated at work, they’ll have the option of leaving. If a child is mistreated, child protection services (could be a charity) can move the child and those tax dollars to a better home. UBI would solve a ton of problems just by ensuring everyone has enough.
If we touch billionaires’ money, it should be with inheritance laws. I think we should tax all assets as if they were liquidated if they aren’t donated to a qualifying charity. That’s the biggest loophole I know about, and it should be closed.
No, they addressed your point.
There isn’t even a mechanism by which to get input from all of society for any single action to benefit humanity.
How? All you’re really doing here is stereotyping rich people.
For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn’t mean all Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.
CileTheSaneThe fact of having a dragon’s hoard of money while people starve is what I am looking at.
Oh, look at that, Gabe has a dragon’s hoard of money and people are starving.
GabeN is hardly rich enough to end poverty or even just hunger, and that’s not the only important cause people could work on. I’d be happy if every billionaire picked some cause and donated to it, no need for society’s input.
Never claimed he could end poverty. But he could donate half his money, still be obscenely wealthy, and end hunger for a lot of people.
Maybe he’s planning to, or maybe he has, idk. We can only really evaluate him on what he does.
We can only really evaluate him on what he does.
Which is what I am doing: evaluating him on what he does and does not do. Not what “he may or may not be planning to do at some undisclosed time in the future.”
What do you mean how? The concept of a billionaire existing being bad has a massive relevance as to whether one individual a billionaire is bad. If the mere fact of being a billionaire is bad, which it obviously is, then it doesn’t matter who this individual billionaire is he’s already tainted by being a billionaire. That’s just one plus one equals two. It’s inescapable logic. Of course it’s relevant.
If the mere fact of being a billionaire is bad, which it obviously is,
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. Becoming a billionaire just means you have a billion dollars worth of assets, and it doesn’t say anything about how you got that money.
There’s a high correlation between billionaire’s and being a bad person, but it’s not 1:1.
I’m not going to get sidetracked into that conversation. Especially when there is absolutely zero chance of us agreeing on it. The topic was whether or not that determination is relevant. Which again obviously it has to be.
And I argue it’s not a given that someone is a bad person just because they have billions of dollars.
Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.
Threre is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. An ethical billionaire doesn’t remain a billionaire. If a suddenly recieved a billion dollars I’d be looking into the best way to donate most of it.
I’m sure I could survive for the rest of my life just fine on $500 million dollars, and whatever causes I’m donating my money to know what they need and how to spend it better than I would by offering them a couple of rooms on my third yacht.
ethical billionaire
A close example is Warren Buffett. He’s about as ethical as they come IMO. He still lives in the same house he bought over 60 years ago, and he has given away a ton of money:
As of June 2025, Buffett had donated over $60 billion to charitable causes.
Hearing him talk about it, it’s apparently really hard to give away that amount of money. He wants to give away something like 99% of his money, but he seems to really like his job and that takes priority for him. He has claimed his children are tasked w/ giving the rest away within 10 years of his passing, outside of the little he has marked for inheritance.
I was going to say that sounds great and we won’t eat him. Then I opened the link and saw that he’s giving his money to the Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation and is conditional on Bill and Milenda Gates still being alive and involved. Why do his charitable donations have to go to a different Billionaire?
Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation
It’s a fantastic charity, and it funds a lot of other great charities. I’m very much not a fan of Bill Gates’ career (I’m a diehard Linux user), but his charitable endeavors and recommended book lists are fantastic.
I don’t care if the person running a charity is a billionaire, I care that they do a good job. He has made philanthropy his life’s mission, and that’s exactly the kind of person I want backing a charity.
So I’m nowhere near a billionaire and it’s perhaps worthless to compare - but once many orgs know you are a “source of charitable donations” they spend a LOT of spam your way - and chances are good that at least half of the charities are scams that barely help anyone. So there’s likely also an unwelcome degree of effort and anxiety in ensuring charity money is used well. Hence why Bill Gates started his own.
Yup, there are a lot of bad charities, and the good ones often can’t handle billions in donations. And doing that takes time away from things you enjoy. There’s a reason he didn’t step away from his position until his 90s, he likes what he does.
I’d be all for removing all the tax cuts from the rich and funneling it into the sciences. They’ve proven that trickle-down is an excuse to hoard and that noblesse oblige is all but dead, so why not cut out the proverbial middleman.
I’m also not a politician being paid by said rich to keep those cuts in place or add more, so my stance means little.