this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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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.
Some people hate all rich people regardless of what they have gotten due to their work.
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.
They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
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.
Steam is selling lootbox and profiting from cs skins gambling. Pretty fucking scummy.
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.
That statement is an absolute.
Yes, their profits.
Eron Wolf might be one of these exceptions. FUTO is trying to support and make sustainable small software projects.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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^(β ) its main product, the browser, to pursue other endeavors that ultimately failed. The only reason that Firefox is relevant is due to the fact that even when stale, Firefox is much less enshittified than its competitors (and not dependent on Chromium).
^(β ) 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.
and steam is the largest game store, but that's not what i was talking about.
microsoft's money doesn't come just from windows, and from seeing how shitty it has (and will) become, they want to get more money from it than they already have. that could be because windows doesnt produce enough money for microsoft or for other reasons.
google's money comes from advertisements. as google grew to be used everywhere, there needed to be a better way to get money from it, so they started doing more advertising.
just like google's search engine, firefox doesn't produce money by itself. but mozilla didn't have any other means of producing money, so they had to do something else for that, even if it didn't work.
valve's money comes from the games and items sold in steam. people aren't going to stop producing or buying games and in-game items any time soon.
all of the other companies had to change their main way to produce money, because that wasn't producing enough money. but if valve changes anything they'll just be shooting themselves in the foot, because steam already produces an almost ulimited amount of money for valve.
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.
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.
You can't become a billionaire ethically. Steam has a pretty big market for lootboxes and cs skins gambling is pretty widespread.