this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 78 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Don't need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you're good to go. Employees wouldn't count contractors either so they probably have a lot more "employees" than that.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...

Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he's not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he's still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.

[–] MajorHavoc 83 points 4 months ago

he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off

It's weird that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (16 children)

he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off

I'm okay with this. Same deal with Costco's founders and CEOs. It'd be nice if billionaires didn't exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.

I'll praise the ones that at least try to do some "good" for people. Even if their "good" is "Let's make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the 'good guy' in the industry".

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it's just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 4 months ago (13 children)

The dude's the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he's gonna be a billionaire.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you'll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

cough GoG cough

I'm agreeing with you, btw.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

GoG

or some publicly traded corporation

CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Exactly. Even with their DRM-free practices and such and how people want to advertise so much for them here on Lemmy, they're still a publicly traded multibillion dollar company.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I expected him to be cool, I guess

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

people should always keep that in mind when praising him

Why?? Good for him, stop being so envious. It's thanks to Valve I started to buy games instead of pirate them anyway. Good prices and good practices.

A billionaire from a game industry is not the same as a billionaire from a real state company or a bank. Games are not a basic need.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago

Nah, a billionaire is a billionaire. There's still people being exploited to get that much money. I don't completely disagree, though - at least Gaben didn't make Valve completely evil and yeah, it's better than fucking up the property market for generations of people.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Billionaires shouldn't exist. The government should regulate all these stores and force a max of 5%. They are clearly colluding and aren't competing in good faith.

This is having a negative impact on the industry, a lot of indie studios would have an easier time surviving if they weren't bled dry by what essentially is a soft monopoly.

Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Steam are all guilty yet you would never defend any of the other ones. Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (18 children)

Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.

Or maybe he is a really cool dude...

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm surprised they didn't really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there's no real money to be made...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They tried that first, it didn't go so well.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Yeah, that's why I said they didn't really tried, the distro isn't even distributed anymore

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Honestly it would probably be worth it as a flagship project to keep their staff engineers excited about something.

I know they earn piles and piles of money, but some people just quit when they've got enough cash, so you need an other sort of carrot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Exactly, proton was much more usefull