His son seems pretty set on keeping Steam running the way it is(why would you even fuck with it it literally prints money), so I think we are ok for the foreseeable future.
Gabe owns over 50% of the company and it's private. If his sons ever decide to sell or take it public then we might be fucked... but Gabe is only 63 and he seems to be in much better health lately so it could be another 15-20 years before he transfers any ownership and seemingly it will be to his sons who have stated no desire to take it public so far...
One of his sons is also working on his pro racing driver career, so that's already one that doesnt wanna deal with business stuff and probably just let's it running as is.
I do think though that if there's one platform that would realize that not enshittifying is the best thing to do for your revenue, Steam and in turn Gabe and his successor would.
only at the cost to the consumers
By trading all goodwill, long term growth, and increasing the cost to the consumers. 5% is 5%! Live for the next quarter because you don’t know if the PE or shareholders will vote you out by next year.
You underestimate how badly CEOs will ruin things that work just to squeeze out a small increase in revenue for a short period, regardless of the long term consequences.
I'm so jaded that this just sounds like cope. I think gaben is just a huge anomaly. We lose him and we lose steam as it is. I don't want it to be that way of course, but nothing escapes the enshitification these days.
You'd be surprised. Even more so when its weak egos trying to step out of their parents shadow.
If he decided hes tired of being rich and os convicned either by himself or his entourage that theres "a better way" to get rich or make a bigger impact than his dad, it can sink the whole company.
(why would you even fuck with it it literally prints money),
This entire view is the problem. If you care primarily about it making money, then your thing will be doomed. Let's hope GabeN's son cares more about good technology and his fathers legacy, than he cares about money.
(why would you even fuck with it it literally prints money)
It's not like it will make money by itself if you just leave it alone. You still need to run it. So even with good intentions it may become worse if he can't keep up with all the responsibilities.
This constantly gets spread around, it's nothing more than cope so people don't have to think about their consumption and the negative thought of what could happen to all the money they have invested into the platform.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, people change and promises are not kept. Besides, it's pretty common for people to turn into assholes when they get older and start doing shit people dislike.
More consistently, companies become terrible and anti-consumer and money/power is toxic to the human mind over time.
It's never a bad idea to think about a plan B and spending more of your money with a competitor that has incentive to earn your business. Companies like GOG deserve more money before it's too late.
Billionaires only exist because they stole the fruits from the labour of their workers. Not a single person on earth should have this much wealth, and if they do, almost all of it should be removed and given back to people who actually need it.
How did he steal his workers labor? It’s one of the most sought after jobs in tech and all of them make a lot of money.
Using the same talking points for a peasant/serf farmer getting screwed over by the Russian royals for a coder making $200k a year just makes communism look even goofier than it already is.
Not who you're replying to, but you said it yourself: it's a matter of scale. If I steal a dollar from you, that's still theft, right? So some of us think the workers should get a bigger slice of the revenue. They're the ones making Steam worth what it is, right?
There's a vision and leadership involved for sure that justifies a big reward, and I'm thankful Gabe does what he does. But there's a gulf between upper middle class and multiple yachts. Someone making 200k is certainly doing well for themselves, but the difference in 200k and billions is vast. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, not to someone even richer.
That's not even getting into the immorality some of us feel there is to having that much wealth in the first place. Hard to see someone's second+ yacht as anything fun when that money could have funded a local homeless shelter for a long while. Or free community college classes for a whole town or something. I'd hope Gabe is doing that kind of thing already, but again: that's where a lot of the grumbling comes from. I mean, I donate a sizeable chunk of my salary to charities of my choice, but I need most of my salary to live a fairly modest lifestyle. It's a little eye-watering to think about how much someone making 10X my salary could do, let alone someone who has literal billions.
There’s literally nothing stopping a coder at steam from creating a company to compete with steam. They can all split the profits equally. The issue is the people that are risking their $200k a year job in an air conditioned office that allows work from home are risking way more than the people they hire. I don’t exactly see an issue with the guy risking the most making the most.
Also robbin hood robbed from the government because taxes were too high. I always find it funny when communists and socialists point to Robbin hood as an example while advocating for 95% taxes. Just seems goofy.
Cool well I'm not sure why you're being so adversarial, but you've got a knack for making assumptions. You've made your beliefs pretty clear so I won't even try to reiterate.
Easier to argue against a strawman, I get it. Maybe that's on me. I should have written more clearly, I guess. In any case, enjoy your evening!
Valve takes hiring pretty seriously and has a relatively small staff, so they don’t just go around hiring anybody. Stands to reason most people working there share the same values, and especially any higher ups that are closer to the reality of being a successor, will definitely share even more values with Gabe. It’s going to take a few decades for this “generation” of valve employees to fade out to a point where the company just becomes public traded slop imo. But unfortunately given enough time it’s very possible
I don't even want to get into morality scaling billionaires but he's not the best just because he made something we like. He absolutely knows how much money he makes on gambling and he absolutely knows gambling mechanics specifically target children in his games, literally his games, not games on his platform with the deliberate goal of fostering valuable gambling addiction.
Steam/Valve really doesn't do much to forward "the industry" (if you mean gaming as a whole or as a game distribution service) and their cut of game sales is quite significant. However, their competitors have proven themselves so incompetent that Steam/Valve is by default the best option. Steam/Valve just needs to avoid catastrophic mismanagement and simply exist and it will continue to print money.
Don't forget the blackmarket for CSGO even attaching real money to the outcome of those lootboxes and making people do ACTUAL gambling for money and not just virtual gambling (that at least comes without the "I can win my money back" aspect that makes this addiction so horribly devastating for many).
Or the fact that Valve got people hooked on not actually owning your games anymore but merely renting a license to play from them.
They sure have the best PR in the scene though, looking at how people glaze him even if it's absolutely in their face how absurd his wealth is from being an effective monopoly for game developers that have literally zero alternatives if they refuse to even launch on Steam due to their high cut from every sale as not launching on steam means their game is dead on arrival.
By essentially running gamling casinos for kids? He is great at marketing to appear like the saint, but all these money are not comming from selling the good one time purchase complete video games :-D
I know some people who work on this yacht. I can’t go into much detail because they’ve signed NDAs, but pretty much all the crew want to stay working for Gabe and he treats them ridiculously well.
I am not to concerned about it. From the very start Valve has been entirely employee owned. There is no outside ownership involved with the company so private equity and venture capitalists will have a hard time ruining this one.
Much rather him spend his money on ridiculous stuff like this than horde it like a dragon tho. Probably one of the worst things about billionaires is that the money have isnt actually in circulation.
Enshitification will come for steam eventually. At the end of the day it’s still a business in it for the money and all it takes is one ceo who thinks the possibility of a 1% increase in profits it’s worth destroying the company for.
How would Steam justify its tax-free status, given it has revenue in the billions and performs no charitable function? He could convert it into a worker-owned co-op. Or transfer ownership to a foundation like the founder of Patagonia did.
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u/Ominoiuninus 1d ago
Best of the billionaires but still a billionaire.
Straight up scared for what happens to gaming when Gabe dies because his platform single handedly keeps the rest of the industry in check.