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
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.
Snot FlickermanPeople 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.
ricecakeI 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.