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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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> Leviathan has two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, diving platforms, and whatever a "dedicated drinks pantry" is. The cherry on top: a room with 15 of the finest gaming PCs ever assembled. Yup, research vessel.
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> It’s easy to secure so that nobody can kidnap you. *Pirates have entered the chat* Yar, hold me grog me matey. *Somali pirates have entered the chat* Look at me. I am the captain now.If you want to fall into an online rabbit hole, search for superyacht security. Those billionaires are spending a lot of money on security and they are totally not keen on getting kidnapped by Somali pirates: > According to a source in the industry, the website Business Insider reported that in a recent foiled plot, an armed pirate group approached a superyacht in the Arabian Sea. However, the pirates were thwarted after the captain deployed sonic weapons and electromagnetic pulse beams that caused severe burns as a countermeasure. > When it was delivered to billionaire Abramovich in 2010, the yacht was valued at 350 million pounds. However, after upgrades and the addition of many modern features, the value of Eclipse is now estimated at around 1.2 billion pounds. The primary factor driving the value of the Eclipse superyacht up is its advanced security system, which includes surveillance radar and a missile defense system along with escape submarines. Yes, escape submarines (!) https://scimyst.com/explore-the-ultimate-weapon-on-super-yachts-120251/
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It turns out that things are complicated, and that a company that is pro consumer in so many ways that almost nothing else is can get praised for that and denigrated for doing predatory loot boxes. And that a billionaire owner can get praised for maintaining a pro consumer company and denigrated for running a loot box racket and buying yachts. All at the same time. It's so exhausting how people like you have to go on every thread and complain that people are happy about something instead of mad about everything, energy single time the company comes up. *sigh*You’re really going out of your way to baby face the corporation that would fuck and sell your kids if it made them a buck. It’s one of the sickest things about Americans, Their NEED to love and defend billionaires and brands. It’s demented
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You’re really going out of your way to baby face the corporation that would fuck and sell your kids if it made them a buck. It’s one of the sickest things about Americans, Their NEED to love and defend billionaires and brands. It’s demented
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Go fuck your Gabe body pillow
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Go fuck your Gabe body pillow
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Well the submarine on their is for research afaik (the hospital too I guess) he is doing ocean floor mapping afaik with manned submarines
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Well that's not fair, a lot of his money also comes from scammers laundering stolen credit card funds through steam game keys.Well, hold on, while that industry is indeed scummy, Valve doesn't ever see a cut of it, do they? Valve allows developers to print their own Steam keys, and takes a 0% cut of them. Game devs use that opportunity to sell the keys to legitimate key sites, which take less of a cut than Steam does, but offer no refund guarantees or other support. Then, credit card thieves buy those keys using stolen cards, and resell them on illegitimate key sites. So in summary, as long as Valve doesn't take a cut on that key generation, they don't directly profit. They just keep allowing key generation to allow game devs a bit more freedom in sale.
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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.
