International Waters: No Laws. No Ethics.

And I mean Gabe is overseeing the Valve team's success, allowing his employees to develop at their pace and following what appears to be their passion. They aren't shoehorning AI or whatever the latest buzzword to goose some imaginary number. Gabe was pissed at Windows enough, he used to work for Microsoft, so he's instrumental in helping break Microsoft's monopoly on gaming operating systems by supporting Linux compatibility and releasing first party hardware. He deserves credit for the culture he cultivates in his company and shares in its success. Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing. The main reason why it is viewed as refreshingly good is because they seem to be one of the few big companies that still believe that profit growth comes from valuing employees, suppliers (gamedevs) and consumers, rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of profit no matter how cruel. It should be the norm yet it seems to be the exception. It would be nice to have no billionaires, but right now we live in a world where government [tells states to clawback aid they gave to hungry families](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/10/federal-judge-snap-recipients-state-provided-benefits/87194473007/) so taxing the rich, or acting in any way that resembles normalcy, is a lot to expect right now. We can let Gabe make a silly luxury purchase. If Valve burns the trust it has earned, then I will move away from them too, I don't owe Gabe or Valve anything.

Gabe is a pretty good billionaire. He has made a lot of people happy. He doesn't spend his money trying to manipulate society. I think Gabe deserves a new yacht.

High chance if he decided to take home "just" $10 million per year, he could pay every single one of the Valve employees at least 100k more every year. That or they could take less than 30% from developer profits.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

>add up a bit for their storage requirements I bet I, myself, with my current hardware could store ALL of the cloud save files with redundancy. Save files are usually some type of text. All of the text on Wikipedia comes out to about 24 GB.

"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)

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.

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."

Valve literally invented case gambling…

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.

There are no good billionaires, kids.

Like what?

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.

I still don't get why people go to bat for valve, despite all the anti consumer shit they regularly do.

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.

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.