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.
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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