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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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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.
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Alternatively, it's a luxury yacht for small teams of passionate scientists to keep them happy and comfortable for long periods, and also a floating town for Gabe to live in Also, if you want to criticize it there's one implication that worries me... Part of the concept is that this yacht will be a floating lab that can pick up and move to avoid regulationsInternational Waters: No Laws. No Ethics.
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He’s just another billionaire. Probably just not the typical sociopathic ones or a narcissist. Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam with irrevocable covenants in its governance that are not manipulated by the next sociopath to take leadership of the company, like Altman is doing with OpenAI. Point being, he might not be a sociopath like the majority of them, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, but he’s not a saint either. There’s also the platforms moderation issues with shitloads of bigotry. Feels like a blind eye but maybe it’s just me. They could take a spare billion in profits, throw it into low risks stocks with dividends or bonds, and pay a team to moderate it out of that in perpetuity without affecting his business or his life like how college endowments work. That is unless the goal for him is still more billions.Exactly. Valve might have a "flat" management structure, but Newell hasn't exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.
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Also, I'm pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly "Gabe Newell making Portal". Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and *very arguably* the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn't have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.
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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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While all that is indeed good, we shouldn't *have to* rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by *taxation.* He is doing some good here, but it's also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It's still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just *hope* that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large.Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.
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Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.Why? It's still bad. He still isn't taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It's a distinction without a difference.
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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.Yeah, I don't understand people who ascribe more to GabeN than running a decent business. Steam has done right by me, so I remain a customer. I didn't play many games before Steam came to Linux, then I played more and more as Linux support improved (Proton was game changing),. My opinion of him ends there. Steam is a great product, as is the Steam Deck. If Valve stops making great products, I'll stop buying. Whether Gabe Newell is a good person is irrelevant here. -
Yeah, it's like $5. The 4% rule puts this at $200k, and even a very conservative 2% is $100k. That's more than the median household income, and you get that for doing nothing. My personal number is more like $2M, which is $40-80k. Assuming my house is paid off, that's enough for me to be generous while not worrying about basic needs.
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While all that is indeed good, we shouldn't *have to* rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by *taxation.* He is doing some good here, but it's also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It's still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just *hope* that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large.I'd be all for removing all the tax cuts from the rich and funneling it into the sciences. They've proven that trickle-down is an excuse to hoard and that noblesse oblige is all but dead, so why not cut out the proverbial middleman. I'm also not a politician being paid by said rich to keep those cuts in place or add more, so my stance means little.
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Personally, if I had GabeN money to spend on a yacht, I would commission something similar to S/S Delphine, S/S Norrskär or / S/S Storskär, I love the classic lines of a late 1800s, early 1900s small ship. Modern yachts/ships look so boring...I would probably donate most of it to a worthy cause. I don't need anywhere near that amount of money, anything over $5M gets donated.
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A billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab. Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization's mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientistsThis yacht is many things, one of them being a floating lab. It's not like it isn't a super-luxury yacht for $500 million, also. Or like he hasn't a couple more super-yachts. I mean, good for the man, good that he's doing marine conservation on the side, or that he actually cares about his companies, employees, etc. But also, wow, what kind of amounts do billionaires spend on playthings, and what you could do with such money for the betterment of society.
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Why? It's still bad. He still isn't taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It's a distinction without a difference.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.
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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.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.
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Depending on where one lives and how lavish they want to live, 1mil USD at 4% interest is enough to make a life on. That's what my financial advisor tells me and I think it's more than reasonable.
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Personally, if I had GabeN money to spend on a yacht, I would commission something similar to S/S Delphine, S/S Norrskär or / S/S Storskär, I love the classic lines of a late 1800s, early 1900s small ship. Modern yachts/ships look so boring...
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Alternatively, it's a luxury yacht for small teams of passionate scientists to keep them happy and comfortable for long periods, and also a floating town for Gabe to live in Also, if you want to criticize it there's one implication that worries me... Part of the concept is that this yacht will be a floating lab that can pick up and move to avoid regulations
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I think the underpaying would be not having nearly as many employees as similar sized companies. They could have several divisions producing games while also developing their hardware and software. He has been happy to make changes at a slower pace while their store keeps taking large cuts of each sale.I suppose so, but maybe they don't want to grow too large. Microsoft absolutely devouring studios the last few years has not produced any truly great games. Valve clearly know how to make a good game still, when they want to.
