I can’t really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he’s been a fantastic steward for Steam.
You can’t become a billionaire ethically. Steam has a pretty big market for lootboxes and cs skins gambling is pretty widespread.
Just wait till he dies and the next person in charge decides to go public to make a quick buck. That’ll begin the immediate enshitification of Steam. How many years do we got till he croaks? Ten? Fifteen? Better hope we have a better alternative before then.
A very typical arc for innovation is that the first organizational goal is getting people to buy it, then the next goal is getting them to keep buying it again and again. The original visionaries who were trying to solve a problem tend to lose interest by then and drop out, and the money weasels completely take over. New versions are released on a marketing schedule regardless of whether they’re necessary, and the thing begins to suck progressively more and more until some new player shows up to solve that problem.
Rinse and repeat.
I’m not going to use something that’s shitty now in hopes it will be better later in order to avoid using something that’s better now out of fear it might become shitty later.
If Steam becomes shitty I have no issue dropping it and pirating my already paid for collection.
I’d like you to point to where I said you should use something shitty now.
doesnt gabe already do basically nothing though? afaik there are other people managing valve and he only acts as valve’s face
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
im not saying its not possible, im just a very optimistic person
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
Micro$oft also has the most dominant operating system in the market. Yet, with every update, I find an increase in “switched to GNU/Linux” and “Debloat Windows” stuff
Google once had the best search engine in the world, delivering the most relevant search results. Now it delivers the most relevant ads.
Mozilla was initially the innovator of the internet, seemingly destined to dominate the market. Then, it abandoned^(†) its main product, the browser, to pursue other endeavors that ultimately failed. The only reason that Firefox is relevantis due to the fact that even when stale, Firefox is much less enshittified than it’s competitors (and not dependent on Chromium).
^(†) Mozilla basically stopped innovating with Firefox until recently. On desktop Firefox, vertical tabs are absent; only recently, in nightly versions, have they been implemented. On Android, Firefox still lacks cross-site isolation, which has been in Chromium for basically forever now.
We are on lemmy, a decentralized and open source platform. Steam is closed as much as reddit is.
Promoting gambling to kids and use the profits to buy multiple mega yachts is peak scum.
Ah, so that’s who this guy is. Thanks! Tbh I had no clue and thought it might be George R. R. Martin.
A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell’s reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don’t remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.
Gabe Newell has a net worth of $9.5 billion and there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. Steam is great and as long as the company behaves well there’s no reason not to use it, but billionaires are not your friends.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming. Also the steam deck was well thought out and designed to be user serviceable.
Was that all Gabe? Or was that people at Valve who had the ideas and executed the ideas and Gabe is given credit for?
“yes”? He’s definitely not building any significant fraction himself, but if he didn’t care for these things he wouldn’t let the company put so much resources into them.
Credit for the things built goes to the people building them. Credit for it being possible to build goes to the people who founded and funded the teams
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming.
Let’s not forget that Steam is a proprietary third party launcher that doesn’t share any values with linux. Valve built the apple store of videogames, while they are now moving in a better direction keep in mind that they are part of the problem.
Sort of agree still. Steam deck is a great example. They built it to be user serviceable, and you can literally switch to the Linux desktop and use root, and reinstall your OS if you want. It’s not locked down crazy like other systems. Remember the PS3 other os? Didn’t even get graphics drivers, then they ultimately removed it when it was used to jailbreak it.
They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
Yes, their profits.
Eron Wolf might be one of these exceptions. FUTO is trying to support and make sustainable small software projects.
Had she not went TERF, JK Rowling would be next to Gabe.
She would arguably be better, because she doesn’t provide gambling services to minors.
Even then, a person can survive just fine with $900 million dollars, and $100 million to the right charity can do a world changing amount of good.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Steam is selling lootbox and profiting from cs skins gambling. Pretty fucking scummy.
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
eh, kinda think strapping a monitor to your face just isn’t the future movies seem to think it should be
You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.
That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.
Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.
His company is working damn hard to make sure you believe they don’t do nothing. All billionares are scum.
What do you believe they do?
Probably gambling stuff?
They do what every for profit company in the world does, they try to make as much money as possible and they spend money in advertising.
This is why Gabe is the goat
I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”
Taking a long term view rather than exclusively focusing on the next quarter’s numbers.
It was the first centralised gaming platform/hub/whatever on PC.
I remember having to search for matches on the All-Seeing Eye.
I lost my first Steam account. It would’ve been from September 2003, the same month Steam released. So apparently it would have had some real life value.
Tried restoring it once, but the email I had had on it was a service that no longer even existed so…
Anyways practical monopolies make money. Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc.
Steam isn’t really in any way anti-competitive unlike the other examples, though.
Dang! You got me beat. The account I still use is from 2004, when Half-Life 2 came out. I remember thinking it was bullshit that I had to sign up for something, and connect to the internet to install a physical game I bought.
Then about five years later, I stayed at my mom’s house for a couple nights, found myself bored, remembered I had my PC in her basement, and set it up. When I discovered that Steam remembered the three games I had, and let me download them (despite losing my HL2 disc years before), my head exploded. It’s wild what it is now and how normalized that is.
Why does this photo looks like he’s doing a porno
His shirt does kinda look like a white bathrobe
I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
<is billionaire <owns yatchs and subs People still wiping his ass with their noses?
He hasn’t enshittified anything yet, and it’s looking like he might not ever, which is why people respect him.
There’s valid criticisms, yes, but that meme is dead accurate. I don’t want to imagine what gaming would look like today if someone like EA the same vast influence over the industry instead of Valve.
Imagine if GabeN created some sort of co-op and left Steam to an employee-run board when he died.
That’s what I was going to say. Sure, Gabe might not be that bad, but what happens to Valve and Steam when he’s gone? Are we just hoping the next guy also isn’t evil?
I was pretty pro-Gabe until I saw some video detailing loot crates and how they targeted kids. There really is no such as thing an ethical billionaire.
As far as billionaires go, he’s the least shit of the bunch. No idea what his personal life is like, and I don’t want to know. Every billionaire that makes their personal life public so far has turned out to be a giant cunt.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Fun fact many don’t know, Gabe helped create the first versions of Windows and claims he learned more at Microsoft than he ever did elsewhere (at the time). So in a way, he’s transcended Windows, vs ripping it apart.
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
Same
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
you know they developed the iPod touch in secrete because they feared that if Steve saw the ugly prototype, he’d shitcan the project?
And where’s the iPod now, eh?
In the iPhone?
Private company with long-term strategy VS public company chasing short-term profits to pump stock prices for shareholders.
That’s the primary reason I abhor the stock market. It no longer works for the creator/owner or the customers at all. It simply feeds the greed of the wealthy (special call-out to private equity here).
Yeah, the flaw there is that money can flow into and out of the stock market basically instantly, so you always have to manage their expectations to make sure your price doesn’t crash.
Idk. With that camera setup I imagine myself on a black leather sofa with a plain white wall behind it.
Gabe , what kind of movie are we making? Gaben?
You’re gonna want to avoid looking down the lens of that “camera”, lol
Someone hasn’t played TF2 lol
Half life 3 : ReLoaded
