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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>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.True that text is small files, but some Skyrim saves are easily in the dozens of MB for example. I'm sure you multiply that by millions and it adds up. Surely them needing to store many copies of the game files themselves is a larger file size footprint for them though.
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I still don't get why people go to bat for valve, despite all the anti consumer shit they regularly do.
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That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.No, I'm explicitly rejecting your point.
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Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you've listed. That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.I agree they're better. I am also blinded a tad, they made Team Fortress 2, my all time favorite game. But they're better for now. There's nothing stopping them from changing their ways when Gabe retires/dies. Maybe they have a private agreement/contract for the next guy to abide by. Maybe they don't. All I know is, Valve is mostly good right now. All major players in the tech space had *some* good intentions at one point (except Facebook). Google used to be about finding content on the internet quickly, easily, and without ads. Now they hide content, spam you with ads and fake overviews, and fight ad blockers. Let's not forget Valve started the microtransaction hell of gaming with their crates in Team Fortress 2. It worked so well they made the game free for more people to buy more crates. Blizzard's Overwatch didn't make you buy a key to open them, Valve still does. Will Valve turn evil overnight? Probably not. But when Gabe is gone, the next billionaire will be as greedy to start with. They're far from the greediest gaming company, but they probably won't roll back any of their percentage cuts or ease off on the gambling in their games. And I'll just have to sign and shake my head as I told people that trusting a company you like remaining a company to like isn't a good thing in a world like ours.
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Oh man on that note talk about Blizzards fall from grace. Just a shell of their former selves.StarCraft was one of my favorite games growing up. I can still quote most of the Terran units. I don't know when or where to say they officially went from "Good with issues" to "Bad with some good games". Doesn't help they ignored their work culture for over a decade.
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It seems really really relevant though...How? All you're really doing here is stereotyping rich people. For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn't mean *all* Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.
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I'm not giving Valve recognition, I'm recognizing that Valve offers good/useful products and services. Maybe I should have said "acknowledge" instead of "recognize", but you're saying something different than me.
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International Waters: No Laws. No Ethics.I do think Gabe has good intentions at least... But... Well... I've never played resident evil, but I've read plenty of cautionary sci-fi tales
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Most comments ITT boil down to two things: * "cat shit is shit, so it's the same as elephant shit" * "cat shit is not the same as elephant shit, so it's not shit"
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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.> Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing. And while theirs is bad, it's also one of the less bad of the MTX nonsense since you can trade stuff on the market, no? So even when they're bad, they're on the less bad end of the spectrum. > It would be nice to have no billionaires, I agree, but the next best is to eliminate generational wealth. Maybe there should be caps on how much can be inherited, with the rest going to charities the heirs don't directly benefit from. I don't think billionaires are automatically bad people, but there is a strong correlation between huge wealth and bad people.
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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.
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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.
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That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.
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>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.
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"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)>as if newell is the guy doing all the work He's the one who makes all the decisions. That's what matters here. > proton and steamos would be nowhere today without the decades of work by the WINE/DXVK contributors And Proton wouldn't exist at all without Valve. > all valve did was add their proprietary client on top of that That's completely false. > that work was done by valve employees and contributors, not the billionaire The billionaire is the one who told them to do it.
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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.> The vessel was built by Oceanco, a firm that's done such a good job that Newell just decided to up and buy it outright in August A yacht - and a yacht builder. -
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."
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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.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg "Lvxferre [he/him]"){kind=avatar}
