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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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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.
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.
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.
It's weird that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that
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.
The dude's the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he's gonna be a billionaire.
He was a billionaire before valve even existed.
Where did you hear that?
He early joined Microsoft and probably had some stock but he left by 1996 so I hardly doubt that made him a real billionaire, (especially given the time).
Afaik his family was always very well off
He was a paperboy and a telegram messenger before college.
That doesn't scream old money boy.
Aren't you confusing him with someone else?
That doesn’t mean he wasn’t well off? Just as an example, there’s a media figure here in Brazil that has a whole ass “self made man” myth is surrounding him because at some point he was selling baubles in the street or other odd jobs like that. And it is indeed true that he did that, but his family owned a media network. So.
Oh and I don’t mean “well off” in the more “old money” sense, you are right, I’m not saying that he was billionaire level due to his family. I see why it seemed like that from what you were replying to, my bad. But I’m fairly sure I’ve read about his parent for the first time this year, and they had fairly comfortable money, to the point that him opening valve wasn’t a real financial risk for instance.
I’ll try to look for where I’ve read that, I didn’t pick it up immediately because I don’t have a pc at hand till Monday and searching for stuff on the phone is annoying. It’s not impossible that I’m mixing up with someone else, but in fairly sure that isn’t the case.
You can't just move the burden of proof on to others like this. You're just spreading misinformation, even if you ultimately turn out to be right what you're doing is unproductive and harmful.
I didn’t propose to move the burden of proof? I’m just explaining I won’t be able to verify easily before Monday.
I’m unsure if I miscommunicated something, but the I’m confused by the harshness of the reply?
The issue is that you're constantly asserting your statement without evidence and when people are offering up contradictory ideas you're asking them to present evidence ("that doesn't mean that he's NOT from a billionaire family") which is shifting the burden of proof. You made the claim, you have to prove it, if people put out other explanations also without evidence then they still don't have the burden of proof since the point under debate is the claim that you made. As the person making the claim you must prove it.
It's not meant to be harsh since this is a very low stakes conversation and topic but what you're doing willingly or unwillingly is exactly how misinformation spreads on more important topics, so it's important that you be aware and correct your behavior.
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.
cough GoG cough
I'm agreeing with you, btw.
CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Or maybe he is a really cool dude...
Gaben owns 6 yatchs and spends between 70 million and 100 million a year maintaining them. He's in the same club as Bezos and the rest.
Stop it with the fucking yatchs already, seriously. Just look at the differences between Vale and the other companys you mention. If you can't see any, you are just a troll.
You can't say anything bad about Valve other than "they make a lot of money". It gets boring.
Billionaires exist because you and me and people like us overpay for stuff, they accumulate wealth by making sure we don't. Gabe's wealth comes from the surplus generated by Valve, if they make that much surplus then they could lower their cut by a fucking lot and so could publishers that also enrich multimillionaire and billionaires.
There are no good rich people.
Can you tell me how has Valve affected the indie industry? In a bad way of course. Most of my steam games are indie games that I assure you I have bought thanks to Steam's shop visibility, review system, forums, easy refunds, cloud saves, and basically all the ease of use it gives. They don't buy small teams and extinguish or terminate them, they don't artificially inflate prices, they don't install rootkits in your computer...
How is the indie games industry worse because of Valve?
The margins are thin in indie development, especially when they are usually offered at bargain prices. I'm going with the assumption that if these platforms had been regulated years ago, a good number of indie developers that shut their doors would have survived with the extra profit. It doesn't seem like a wild assumption to make.
Steam doesn't tell developers or publishers how much their games are worth. They only provide the tools for them to sell them, and they obliviously get a cut from it, but only if you sell. They don't ask for money in advance, they don't ask for any contract.
Valve is a store front, not a publisher. I'm thinking you are just confused about how they operate.
Valve is a store front in a soft monopoly with other similar products and colluding with them. We would have more and better quality games if the government did its job and regulated the store front industry.
Instead of regulating, you seem to imply these costs should be passed down to us instead and the indie industry should just bring up it's prices, just so Gaben can keep his six yatchs. I think you are confused about your own self interests.
They already are.
I really think you know nothing about what you talk or how the market works, this isn't even fun.
It sounds like they are parroting what that guy from Epic Games is saying. While that guy also is a millionaire.
Instead of circle jerking it with your buddy, why don't you point out where I'm wrong.
To be clear these are my own opinions and I clearly think Epic Games should be regulated just like the other platforms.
I think all the platforms are predatory and taking advantage (except gog), it's you guys that are giving steam a free pass when they are at best slightly better than the others but still shit. I guess bootlicking is easy if steams marketing team convinces you it's in your best interest.
I haven't seen any evidence backing up your claims. And I'm not here to convince you of anything. You're the one making these bold claims. How about backing them up then?
I said this was costing us indie studios
You said they chose what price they put up their game for, implying the best solution is us paying more instead of steam getting less
I explained I think this is a bad decision for us the consumers and the industry as a whole and more importantly, that steam can absolutely afford to pay less.
Reread the whole conversation and try to understand what I'm saying if you want me to continue conversing with you. You seem to be ignoring my points and we are going in circles.
Implying I don't know what a store front is or how it works is condescending.
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.
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...
They tried that first, it didn't go so well.
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.