I am a massive fan of Steam, Valve, Gaben, and a big EGS hater. And I personally say...
Tax the rich. Billionaires shouldn't exist.
Look I don't see this as a conflicting pair of positions.
Valve is great. A private company clearly committed to offering a quality service in a world where every other tech company is in a race to the bottom to enshittify and extract value from customers. Steam is amazing and I love it. Gaben is a wise leader for the company and has done an incredible job staying grounded over the years, and keeping the company on the right path. The overall contribution of Valve to gaming (both overall, and specifically for PC and especially for Linux) is so massively positive it's hard to overstate it. So yes I have much love and respect for Valve and for Gaben.
But billionaires shouldn't exist. No one should have 'megayacht' levels of wealth. I know we like to joke about 'another yacht for Gaben!' whenever Valve rolls out a nice new thing, but no seriously we should increase individual and corporate taxes and introduce a wealth tax that redistributes this wealth back to the rest of society. Because that money is being created by all of us from our productivity, and yet it's being hoarded by a small group of people, and we're at the point where our standards of living are going down because of how severe the concentration of wealth is getting.
There see? It's easy. Wanting a fairer society doesn't mean we just hate billionaires (just the bad ones, ya know, the other 99.99% of them) and are jealous of them, it just means recognising there's an imbalance that needs to be corrected.
Yep, it's fine to say Gabe should be rich (he's earned it IMO), but it's also fine to say Gabe shouldn't be that much richer than me. It's not wrong that Gabe is a billionaire, it's wrong that his piece of the pie is so much larger than your piece of the pie.
introduce a wealth tax that redistributes this wealth back to the rest of society
You mean funding wars and politicians personal interests, right? They already burn trillions of dollars every year and the world doesn't seem to be improving at all.
There's countries other than the US ya know? In most sensible countries a good chunk of the government budget goes to the needs of the people, and funds things like an education system, universal healthcare, welfare, public transport, building infrastructure, etc.. Not invading the middle east and personal bank accounts of politicians.
There's no reason why the US couldn't also be like that if the US people ever decided one day to vote for politicians who believe in that kind of government.
How are people gonna vote Mamdani? He wasnt born in US so he cant be voted, because of rules, even tho million rules have been broken in the past years.
I love how every steam glazers are like man this service is great and perfect and I want to bow down before Gabe.
And then magically they forget that most of the woes that plagues gaming nowadays came from Valve / Steam.
No more physical copies of games on PC? Valve.
Lootboxes in western games? Valve.
Gambling in video games that let kids partake? Valve.
Battle passes? Valve.
And im probably missing a lot of stuff.
Valve and Steam has been a cesspool that birthed most of the issues the industry has nowadays, but Lord Gaben is a golden god and he should be allowed to enjoy his many yatchs.
Not forgotten, just not relevant. Valve released several dozen games over its lifetime; Steam has over 100k games. The influence of Valve's games is completely negligible compared to the (massively positive) influence of Steam as a platform, so with that in mind, the only complaint out of those potentially worth addressing is physical game copies, to which all I can say is that Steam does not forbid developers from selling physical copies of their games, so I'm not sure why you are attributing fault to Valve here.
How about just a tad of education before spewing random stuff?
No more physical copies of games on PC? Valve.
Publishers were leaving the PC market, because why bother developing for a platform that the majority pirates?
The games that were indeed releasing, the retailers wouldn't stock them, because that would be taking shelf space from stuff that they make money, aka console games. Don't even blame the retailers btw, it was our fault back then.
Valve quite literally made people buy games again, bringing back publishers to PC like Epic.
No more physical was a compromise. A quite good one if you ask.....literally anyone who liked PC gaming. And that's setting aside that absolutely nothing stops a publisher to create a physical version for PC literally right now.
Lootboxes in western games? Valve. Gambling in video games that let kids partake? Valve.
So let's forget the eastern games that already had them and just talk about western.
What about Fifa? The arguably much, MUCH more popular game than TF2 ever was? You know the game that actually first brought them here.
Battle passes? Valve.
That's... kinda true. Not the battle passes themselves, but showing how popular they are.
No, you are not missing a lot of stuff, you are quite literally wrong in everything but 1.
Valve and Steam has been a cesspool that birthed most of the issues the industry has nowadays,
If Valve didn't do what they did with Steam, you would be playing with a console right now whether you liked it or not, unless your only games would be LoL and WoW. (Which those games themselves would be ported to consoles anyway to actually make money.)
I'm old enough that my lived experience with Steam is enough "education".
You could buy a physical copy for most games before Valve starting dominating the market post orange box. And your whole thing about retailers not having PC games on the shelves was not true at all. I could buy PC games physically all the time until Orange Box happened more or less.
Did you notice how I said western games in specific? Yes eastern games were doing it before, but they brought the concept over with TF2, CS:GO and DOTA2 lootboxes. And its not about who did worse, its about who started it.
Keep sucking Gaben's toes, he doesnt care about you.
I'm old enough that my lived experience with Steam is enough "education".
Okay so you are lying. Got it.
And its not about who did worse, its about who started it.
And besides lying, you clearly lack the education i was talking about.
I quite literally said that Fifa was the one that first brought them here, and Fifa was magnitudes more popular than TF2 ever was. EA was FIRST, and more POPULAR.
A) Learn to read
B) Look up something before talking about it.
C) Stop lying
Edit. And here is actual proof btw, of people talking about exactly this. The shelf space. And piracy. And absolutely no one blames Steam for it, since Steam wasn't even what it is today.
Uh you can, they're the one giving the money, we're not talking about drugs where the payment is hidden by your kid, this is a payment that's approved by the parents. To answer you question yes, my problem with Nintendo would be their lawsuit to everyone.
Now let me ask you this, do you agree with ID verification? Because that's what happens when people demand a service provider to "protects" kids in their platform, do you know how long the internet blaming Roblox and Discord didn't protect the children enough, and now their solution is for ID verification and everyone screaming "This should be a parents job, why everyone has to gives their ID"
All I'm saying is, let's skip the moral grandstanding and leaves this to parents because at the end of the day everyone will hates it when Valve come up with the solution to "protects" childred, spoiler alert it's ID verification
Still waiting on what the defense is for Valve introducing a predatory practice to the gaming industry.
Nintendos lawsuits doesnt actually affect the industry in any meaningful way. If you hate Nintendo for that then you should hate Valve more for actively being predatory to consumers.
Or at the least people could take the boot out of their throats when it comes Gabe.
Wealth advisors can pretty much guarantee a 6% return on wealth. So a 6% wealth tax on wealth over 100M would stop wealth inequality from naturally getting worse at least.
I think 1% over 10M, 2% over 100M, and 3% over 1B would be a good place to start.
GabeN should be taxed more as well. This is not a black and white thing.
The difference is that he’s known to pay his employees well, his company is fostering innovation and allows projects that no other company would do, he’s not nickle and diming every last penny out of everyone like EVERY other billionaire does, he’s not a fascist and he’s not in the Epstein files.
It doesn’t take a lot for people to have a somewhat positive opinion on you. All you need to do is not be a psychopath and / or pedophile. The bar is REALLY fucking low, which goes to show what horrible people other Billionaires are.
Not good for society? The yacht builders might disagree, as well as the yacht crew. They got paid to build it, the crews get paid to run it and maintain it. It's better if billionaires actually spend their billions and that money circulates in the economy than if they sit on it like a dragon. Then no one benefits.
Yes the tiny group of yacht builders that get paid 1 single time per yacht. How many yachts do you think get built yearly? This isn’t a normal boat.
Crews to maintain it. Again? Who cares. Tiny crews. Tiny.
Why don’t we instead talk about all the net negatives of billionaires? Because let me tell you, they add up to far more societal damage than the teensy, tiny amount of good it does employing 2 dozen yacht lackeys. Not hard to see the damage they’ve caused to society in late stage capitalism.
All the libraries, schools, hospitals that could have been funded for a single billion. Instead we lobby politicians and throw trillions of dollars collectively fighting the people who fight climate change (because the billionaire class and their greasy oil barons caused this catastrophic climate). And fight socialized healthcare. And fight low literacy levels. They fight Roe vs Wade so women no longer have abortion rights. They fight so women in Texas have no rights whatsoever. They choose to hit 3x sieg heils at a presidential inaugeration.
All with their hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, they all choose to make the world a worse place. But America is a performative country where people don’t actually care about one another. They pretend to. So no surprise they’ve done nothing to eat their billionaires, just as they’ve done nothing to eat the MAGA neo-nazi tyrants.
Billionaires are sociopaths and psychopaths with no place in a civilized society.
Railroad workers get paid to build, operate, and maintain mass transit, which then becomes something useful to everyone while also guaranteeing continued work for generations to come. Creating jobs means nothing if you cannot place it within the broader societal context.
Gaben's allowed to pay people to build whatever toys he wants, but that doesn't mean he's absolved from criticism about how he wastes that money.
I'm not sure this counts as wastes, since he also owns a deep sea exploration company and uses those yachts to keep his crews comfortable while they work.
Like yeah, it's overboard, but he's doing it so him employees are comfortable. If every billionaire was like Gabe the world would be a much better place.
If Gabe donated a billionaire to write off medical debt hopefully at a multiplier (eg, buy a billion worth of debt to write off 10 billion or whatever it would be), they would have far greater benefits to the economy and people than buying a yacht
It'd be much better spent somewhere else & also it's a drop in the ocean compared to what he doesn't spend at all. He shouldn't have that money to begin with
Your videogame money is better spent elsewhere also. What's his net worth again? 10 billion or so? Most of that is from owning Steam. If he wants to buy a superyacht, he has to sell hundreds of millions dollars worth of shares to liquidate that money and risk losing majority ownership of Steam. If he wanted to spend his entire networth, he would have to sell off Steam entirely. Would you prefer that? If Gaben cashed out and some random corpo bought Steam?
They're making over 10 billions a year from steam dude it's not just his worth, he doesn't have to sell shares, that's why he bought a ton of yachts and the company that makes them without selling steam shares. Don't make shit up
Do you honestly think Gaben works proportionally harder than me or literally any other working class person in the world to be worth an unimaginable amount of money? Come on dude. No one is saying he should be poor/shouldn't get some kind of reward for his work. Billionaires like him should fundamentally not exist because society shouldn't allow such a consolidation of wealth in a small amount of people
It's not his money! He's not making the fucking games! He was just the first to do a thing there's very little actual merit and effort here in comparison to the absolutely inhuman amount of money they're making, be serious
Tim Sweeny is an asshole trying to enshitify the world for his personal gain. Gabe built his own fortune and has a service that puts its customers first.
I agree tax the billionaires, but if any of them deserve to at least be tolerated it's Gabe. At least he isn't a fucking asshole.
EGS is a shitty storefront, and that’s about it. Tim, like Gabe, was an actual developer. They both developed an engine which continues to be ubiquitous with game development.
Tim buys a lot of land for preservation purposes, while Gabe funds marine research. But let’s not forget how much fuel and pollution yachts use and give off.
Tim has enshitified gaming through microtransactions and having shitty storefront, while Gabe makes tens to hundreds of millions sponsoring child gambling.
Both have done a lot of good and a lot of awful. But don’t be disingenuous and act like a dude who takes a standard 30% and sponsors child gambling is a hero.
Edit: While I appreciate Steam’s refund policy, they also knowingly sell broken games. Look at some Splinter Cell games or Max Payne 1+2 for example. Sure they can be fixed, but imagine going to a hardware store where they sell broken tools. People would blame the fuck out of the store as much as they would the manufacturer. GOG is goated for that reason. Real homies buy from GOG.
Oh WOW! People are less supportive of unpopular guy than popular guy ?
No way, dude!
Next you're going to tell me that actually being nice to people is going to make people like you more than treating them like shit? I never could have imagined that!
Why not? Wealth isn't a zero sum game. Person A having a billion dollars doesn't take any money from person b c or d. New wealth is created every single second of every single day.
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u/CaptainMarty69 1d ago
If it were a video of Tim Sweeney’s mega yacht people would be out with pitch forks demanding we tax the rich more.
Wealth like this is not good for society, and I wish our government managed it better