A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
Gabe 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
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Here'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.
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> ethical billionaire A close example is [Warren Buffett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Philantropy). 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.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.
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Because EGS offers roughly 5% of the services Steam does, and Epic is still spending a shitload of money keeping EGS going at loss.
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Because epic isn't the market leader, by a large margin.
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I think you are missing the point of my question. Why would valve get in legal trouble if they charged less? Both EGS and steam is stored, no? They should be bound by the same laws. Afaik there are no special laws just because you are the market leader.
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Epic is in no position or standing to compete against valve. To be a monopoly, you have to actually own an overwhelming portion of the market you're in.
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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.
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> Something that doesn't have to be able to cross the ocean can be had for well under a million I think Well, well under a million. You can cross the ocean safely and in comfort on 30k yachts, 10ish metres.
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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.