this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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that moment when the One Good Billionaire™ casually orders a boat that costs several times more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes 🙃
i get that there's worse out there but i'm tired of people acting like newell is a saint... he's just another billionaire.
People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent, and there's always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it's "supposed to" is still capitalism.
It's quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970's was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn't until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.
However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).
My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
It's not network effects (but slightly related), it's opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn't hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn't cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they'll drop you if you're small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They're big enough that many devs think it's worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that's what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co
I think we're just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.
"Hi! We're valve. We're mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn't deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn't deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves" -- Hands down one of the best "big" companies out there.
Here's another way you can look at Valve.
They are a case study of how a privately held company, a company that does not have a boardroom of investors, demanding maximum possible short term profit, all the time...
Can actually allocate capital more efficiently, and generally more fairly, and innovate better than a ravenous hoard of interest/rent seekers.
You can look at them as essentially a counter argument to the modern American concept of a publically (stock market) traded company.
While what they do, the tech, the platform, the games... while that's rather cutting edge... the way they do it, that's actually old school, at the level of how a business fundamentally works, is legally defined.
They are not 'beholden to capital' so much as they are ... 'beholden to Gabe.'
You would think business majors and economists could look at this and go... oh, turns out capital markets aren't efficient, at all, in the long run!
We are at the point now where a privately held, effective monopoly / oligopoly is... actually less evil than basically every other major tech firm that is entirely investor-returns / capital-rent driven... where probably roughly 20%-40% of the people/orgs on all those other boards ... are just the same people, forming basically a de facto conspiracy.
Basically, being beholden to a single, publically visible capitalist, who doesn't have to show you his internal books... appears to be objectively better than being beholden to many, obfuscated, invisible capitalists, despite them actually having to show you their books.
This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn't work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Lumberyard, essentially a fork of CryEngine, is essentially abadoned and spun off into O3DE.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet... and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh... kind of let you do some extremely basic office work, awkwardly.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn't matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they're forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition from MySpace 2.0, into the gamified, data mongering, hypercapitalist hellscape attention based economy.
All mobile gacha games with massive MTX and gambling/loot box/dark pattern style mechanics can basically trace their lineage back to Farmville.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
I agree, it's easier to do it worldwide, but that doesn't stop companies from writing extra code to comply with local restrictions only locally.
Look at all the US companies where their websites function differently if you are in california or not.
It was a law, but they were by no means forced to be good about it and let everyone in the world benefit.
Everyone also seems to ignore that they started the lootbox epidemic.
A billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab.
Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization's mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientists
While all that is indeed good, we shouldn't have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it's also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It's still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don't. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do "for the future" are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don't care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn't mean the situation doesn't still suck ass.
The situation sucks, but I guess we have to count our "wins" these days.
If this money he is using to advance marine science was taxed, I guarantee it would be given straight to the US Military for creating more weapons of mass destruction.
A lot of things need to change in this world.
I don't think anyone is saying that billionaires existing is a good thing.
I'd be all for removing all the tax cuts from the rich and funneling it into the sciences. They've proven that trickle-down is an excuse to hoard and that noblesse oblige is all but dead, so why not cut out the proverbial middleman.
I'm also not a politician being paid by said rich to keep those cuts in place or add more, so my stance means little.
This yacht is many things, one of them being a floating lab. It's not like it isn't a super-luxury yacht for $500 million, also. Or like he hasn't a couple more super-yachts.
I mean, good for the man, good that he's doing marine conservation on the side, or that he actually cares about his companies, employees, etc. But also, wow, what kind of amounts do billionaires spend on playthings, and what you could do with such money for the betterment of society.
You don't do "marine conservation" by pumping oil into a fleet of personal yachts.
If your hobby is marine conservation you don't own a fleet of luxury mega yachts
100000%.
Imagine believing this.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole after skimming through the article...
Neural interfaces? Uh oh, that reminds me of another billionaire and a heart-breaking story about animal testing.
https://www.gsmgotech.com/2025/05/gabe-newellbacked-starfish-bci-chip-to.html
Oh ok... well that doesn't sound as bad. Wait, didn't Valve just announce a new VR headset that has a port which can be used for 3rd party accessories?
Hmmm...
If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially "force" people's brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.
Refreshing to hear this take. Valve and Gabe get glazed so hard when at the end of the day it's about the bottom dollar for them too.
Honestly I think people love them so much because everyone else has been horrible by comparison.
People love them because they still offer good products and services, some of them completely for free. I think it's perfectly valid to recognize and appreciate the good, even when there's also bad.
You must likely will never earn more than 2 mil in your lifetime. With 2 orders of magnitude and a doubling factor, that’s still not 500M lmao. And just like a car purchase, that’s only for the purchase price, not the upkeep.
A yacht - and a yacht builder.
Yeah, everyone is like "I wanna call it the GabeCube".
I dunno man, I get that Valve is letting them work on cool shit but the people working on these things should get credit too. We don't know how big Gabe's involvement too and I don't want to deify a billionaire for no obvious reason.
Yeah, I don't understand people who ascribe more to GabeN than running a decent business. Steam has done right by me, so I remain a customer. I didn't play many games before Steam came to Linux, then I played more and more as Linux support improved (Proton was game changing),.
My opinion of him ends there. Steam is a great product, as is the Steam Deck. If Valve stops making great products, I'll stop buying. Whether Gabe Newell is a good person is irrelevant here.
He owns the 50th largest yacht in the world and 5 more, i would argue he's on top with the worst not just another
He’s just another billionaire. Probably just not the typical sociopathic ones or a narcissist.
Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam with irrevocable covenants in its governance that are not manipulated by the next sociopath to take leadership of the company, like Altman is doing with OpenAI.
Point being, he might not be a sociopath like the majority of them, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, but he’s not a saint either.
There’s also the platforms moderation issues with shitloads of bigotry. Feels like a blind eye but maybe it’s just me. They could take a spare billion in profits, throw it into low risks stocks with dividends or bonds, and pay a team to moderate it out of that in perpetuity without affecting his business or his life like how college endowments work. That is unless the goal for him is still more billions.
Nobody should have that much wealth, I don't care what they do.
I have always respected Gabe's "fuck gamers I do what I think is cool" mindset though. Fuck gamers.