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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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I've been told over and over again that Valve *needs* that 30% and they can't possibly do all that they do with a lower margin. Clearly hosting some files, hosting a forum, processing payments, etc is about ONE THIRD of all the talent and effort that goes into creating a game.Lol yep they're an extremely wealthy company with that 30%. But it seems like almost every other storefront operates under those margins for digital sales (not just in gaming). I do value the cloud saves, I think those would actually add up a bit for their storage requirements as well as hosting all of the game files in presumably many locations globally. 15%, they'd still be a multibillion dollar company
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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.
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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. -
This is that research vessel he talked about a while back. >Leviathan has also been designed with scientific work in mind: Newell's interests now include Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces (popularly known as "brain chips"), and Inkfish, a marine research operation. Part of this is a "convention-defying layout" that apparently brings teams together, which makes me think about all the times I've read about desks with wheels at Valve.
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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.While I won't defend that he could be much more altruistic with his money, but complying with different refund laws at a digital level is super easy to do. Even more so for Australia, since it isn't like anyone bouncing between country borders all the time there.
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Refreshing to hear this take. Valve and Gabe get glazed so hard when at the end of the day it's about the bottom dollar for them too. Honestly I think people love them so much because everyone else has been horrible by comparison.
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We are so used to billionaires being obnoxious assholes that one that isn't obnoxious about their billions feels like one of the good ones, I guess. He made his money (like any other billionaire) by overcharging and underpaying. He wastes his money on useless bullshit like any other billionaire. But he's not obnoxious about it, which causes people to just ignore the part about billionaires that's actually bad (the way they became billionaires).He charged less than others and pays better than others. Valve also can't take much of a lower cut on game sales because their current cut is the market average and valve would get in legal trouble for monopoly practices and unfair competition because they're already so much more popular than the few competitors they have. What Gabe could do is give money away and be like alteuistic.
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I don't think anyone thinks he's a saint, despite the memes. Except if you compare him to the fucking sleazeballs at companies like Epic, Rockstar, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, etc. etc., not to mention every other publicly traded corporation, he kind of his. Again, **by comparison**. He single-handedly improves the entire industry. He could very well have developed a locked down Steam OS that won't do anything but play games but he instead invested in an open source platform that sorely needed it, and makes the world a better place. Steam doesn't have to put up big banners for Denuvo or AI or games that require a remote account but they do, purely for the benefit of the users."single-handedly" lmao, as if newell is the guy doing all the work and not the valve employees who work for him… or, yknow, the contributors to all the open-source projects steamos is built on proton and steamos would be nowhere today without the decades of work by the WINE/DXVK contributors, and the myriad of other open-source projects that make Linux into what it is. all valve did was add their proprietary client on top of that (as well as fund the development of proton, tbf, i'm thankful for them on that one)
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If you made people's nostalgia, they will defend you. Nintendo has defenders. Disney has defenders. Blizzard has defenders. And so on. People will defend a company for free because they did something cool ~20 years ago.
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Refreshing to hear this take. Valve and Gabe get glazed so hard when at the end of the day it's about the bottom dollar for them too. Honestly I think people love them so much because everyone else has been horrible by comparison.People love them because they still offer good products and services, some of them completely for free. I think it's perfectly valid to recognize and appreciate the good, even when there's also bad.
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Lol yep they're an extremely wealthy company with that 30%. But it seems like almost every other storefront operates under those margins for digital sales (not just in gaming). I do value the cloud saves, I think those would actually add up a bit for their storage requirements as well as hosting all of the game files in presumably many locations globally. 15%, they'd still be a multibillion dollar company
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Funny, I was just reading about this sort of thing in "How to blow up a pipeline". It's the sort of argument that seems obvious in retrospect. When someone in the global south uses a coal stove to cook their food, they're doing it by necessity. When a billionaire sails out on a mega yacht, it's pure excess. Yeah, banning them won't make the difference between 1.5C and 2.0C of global warming, but it's low hanging fruit. We can also ban private jets, and the only significant impact to the economy would be that some billionaires have to travel around in first class like some kind of lowly multimillionaire or upgraded plebian. It does not matter if you think Valve makes good products or not.It'd be cool if these mandated these things be solar/battery/sail powered.
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People love them because they still offer good products and services, some of them completely for free. I think it's perfectly valid to recognize and appreciate the good, even when there's also bad.
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> the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
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I don't think anyone thinks he's a saint, despite the memes. Except if you compare him to the fucking sleazeballs at companies like Epic, Rockstar, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, etc. etc., not to mention every other publicly traded corporation, he kind of his. Again, **by comparison**. He single-handedly improves the entire industry. He could very well have developed a locked down Steam OS that won't do anything but play games but he instead invested in an open source platform that sorely needed it, and makes the world a better place. Steam doesn't have to put up big banners for Denuvo or AI or games that require a remote account but they do, purely for the benefit of the users.It's like he said decades ago, or near decades ago. Piracy is a quality of service problem. When you do the right thing the right way, people will come and you can make a shit load of money. Same thing like you said about SteamOS. They didn't have to make it open, and could have made money, but the ecosystem that can be built around an open platform, and the people you can draw to it are going to be miles better than a closed system where thats the mindset from the top.
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The governments of normal people could be doing it but the money is going to billionaires instead.There are a lot of things governments are not doing that people with money do that benefit everyone and that's a good thing imo. Governments want to be liked and be re-elected by the mass and that means doing the things a lot of people care about wich is a good thing too. A lot of good is also being done in the world not by billionaires or governments but by groups of people with goals that asks for funding from average people and rich people to reach their goals. I will always applaud people for doing good things. That doesn't mean i can't be very critical when they are doing bad things. As far as i know the boats gabe newell is buying are for research and not to chill and have parties.
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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.
